Smoke on the Water
by P.H. Wise
Summary: Centuries after the Ethereal war, after humanity discovered a galaxy filled with alien life, after the defeat of Sovereign, the abductions have begun again. This time, entire human colonies are disappearing. And a reborn Commander Shepard and the long-thought defunct Extraterrestrial Combat Unit may be the only thing standing between humanity and extinction... (XCOM/Mass Effect)
1. Lazarus

Smoke on the Water  
by P.H. Wise  
A Mass Effect/XCOM Crossover Fanfic

Chapter 01: Lazarus

Disclaimer: I don't own Mass Effect. That would be EA. I don't own XCOM or its associated properties. God only knows who does. I'm not making any money off of this. Please don't sue me.

* * *

She was cold. It was a new thing. There hadn't been cold before. Or maybe there hadn't been 'her' before. It didn't matter; she was cold. A sense of weight came next. Pressure. Her body. She had a body, and she could feel its weight, and the bed was cold.

"...Shpd... k p."

Sound. A voice. A woman's voice. "Liara?" she asked, or tried to ask - what came out was a slurred groan from a voice she barely recognize. Liara? Was that someone important? The name felt familiar, but she couldn't quite...

"Shepard, you have to wake up."

Shepard. Was her name Shepard? She wasn't sure. Her eyes snapped open. The room swam into view. A lab. She was on a bed. Readouts and displays all around her. She stared with dull incomprehension. The woman who had spoken was nowhere to be found.

_**Pain.**_

It spiked inside her. In her head, and she cried out, twisted, fell. The impact with the ground her less than her thoughts.A sick, _crawling_ sensation, like a thousand worms were burrowing through her brain and she could feel every one.

_**Voices.**_

Dozens. Dozens of voices, frantic whispers, calls for help, screams of terror, and all of them with one thing in common: they were being silenced. Every moment that went by, another went quiet. _If we lose Shepard, then humanity might follow. I DON'T WANT TO DIE! Why isn't she getting up? Did we wake her too soon? Am I going to die? Damn it, we couldn't afford to wait. Not like this. I won't be used against my own people. I won't. This is not good. Frigid bitch. Never took notice of me. Never saw me there. I worked miracles for her, and she responded like it was only her due. Fuck her. Fuck the whole project. They want Shepard? I'll give them Shepard. In pieces. Am I real? Was I ever real to begin with?_

_**Silence.**_

"Shepard, you have to get up! There are MECs heading for your position!"

She staggered to her feet. Her head felt like it was on fire. There was something. Something... if she could just

_Think._

If she could just...

_**Think.**_

"Shepard, you have to get out of there!"

A glowing purple orb. The world consumed. She was dying. The ship exploded, raining debris down onto the planet, and she was dying. The last thing she saw was the Earth below her, shining, glorious, and all alone in the night.

No. That was wrong. That wasn't how it had happened.

"Shepard!" The voice was growing panicked now, and the alarm cut through the haze somewhat. The sound of distant gunfire thudded through the walls. "Get up, Shepard! The facility is under attack, and if you don't get yourself armed and armored right now, you are going to die!"

A locker. She reached, and it opened without her hands ever touching it. Within was a set of N7 armor modeled for her body, and a pistol. She stared dumbly at the locker's contents, fighting waves of vertigo.

_What am I wearing?_

She looked down. A grey jumpsuit with an insignia she didn't recognize. Something about it stirred at her memory, but she couldn't be sure what it meant. She stripped out of her jumpsuit, and then began to put on the armor, starting with the skin tight base layer. Two minutes later she was done, and her thoughts were clearer. Then she looked down at the pistol. "... the hell?" she asked. She hadn't seen a plasma pistol since... she didn't know when.

"What's the problem?" the woman's voice asked.

"The pistol is an antique," she replied.

"We can discuss the pros and cons of plasma vs laser small arms some other time, Shepard," the woman said. "Perhaps some time when there aren't two MECs bearing down on your position."

"... Right." She checked the charge. Still good. Shouldn't need to reload within the scope of normal operations. "OK. I'm moving out."

"Oh, hell. Shepard, the MECs will be on your location in a matter of moments."

She could hear them now. There was the shriek of tearing metal, and the stomping of heavy mechanical boots approaching at a sprint. She took a breath, ducked behind cover, and waited.

She didn't have to wait long. They came down the stairs into the area just outside the lab at a dead sprint: two men in full MEC suits, each suit a full three meters of towering cybernetic badass. And their eyes wide in terror as an outside force directed their bodies against her. A nul wouldn't have been able to perceive it, but to her eyes the psionic influence was as obvious as the rising sun. Telepaths. Two of them. Powerful, too.

The MECs opened fire with twin barrages from their plasma cannons in full autofire mode. Her eyes widened, and she threw herself to the side as the transparent half-wall she'd been sheltering behind was blown through like it wasn't even there.

She was lucky: one of them wasn't wearing a helmet. That was stupid in this day and age: even without taking laser weaponry into account, kinetic barriers could protect you from a plasma bolt, but they couldn't stop its heat. She could see the man, sense his terror, his frantic effort to claw back control of his body from whatever had taken control of it. She knew that his name was Richard Jones.

'**No, no, no, no, no! Please, I don't want to die!'**

No one ever does.

She came back to her feet and fired three times in rapid succession. The kinetic barrier stopped each shot a few inches in front Richard's face, but that didn't stop the released heat from cooking his brain inside his skull.

A plasma bolt clipped her side as the other MEC trooper redirected his fire, and that shot by itself took down her barriers: the next hit sent temperature alarms spiking dangerously on her HUD as her armor registered the damage both to itself and to her body. It didn't hurt. That was probably shock. She locked eyes with the man, and the world went away.

His name was Jacob Taylor, and beneath his terror he still struggled against the man who was controlling him. He'd been prepared to die for the cause. He hadn't been prepared to be used as a weapon against it. He fought. It didn't work, but he fought.

The Presence reacted when it sensed her in the man's thoughts. It lashed out with a clumsy if powerful psychic attack. It was a simple, brutal trick: all your memories played at once. All your memories and all your fears. A mind not properly trained in psychic combat would have been crushed beneath the tide, but she was an N7: she shed the attack as a duck sheds water, seized the Presence, and passed through the link between it and Jacob Taylor's mind.

A thousand alien thoughts bombarded her as she seized control of the Presence's mind. "... Don't fight it," she whispered. "Let it happen."

… There. It was hers. The awareness that belonged to the Presence bloomed into being inside her awareness, like a window in her mind. He was fighting back, and he was good: she'd only have control for a few seconds before he wriggled out from under her. So she did what she had to: using the other psychic's own body as her tool, she used his hand to draw his laser pistol, planted it against his temple, and pulled the trigger. She had just enough time to register the other psion's terror and despair before his death broke the telepathic connection, and she was back in meatspace again, staring into the eyes of a now recovered Jacob Taylor, and despite her suit's automatic medical systems already having applied med-gel during her psychic conflict, the whole left side of her stomach felt like it had been dipped in molten lead.

She let out a breath. She was alive. And she'd survived combat with two fully equipped MECs. The adrenaline began to fade, and she nearly collapsed with exhaustion. "Mr. Taylor," she acknowledged.

Jacob Taylor stared at her, his mouth slightly dropped open. "Sh, Shepard?" he asked. His voice was hoarse as if from screaming, and his thoughts raced, but she didn't intrude on them this time.

Shepard. Right. That sounded familiar. Sounded like her name. Jane Shepard. "Yeah."

"... Thank you."

She nodded.

Neither of them looked at the dead man on the floor, and neither of them mentioned just how close they'd each come to joining him.

"Answers," she said.

"My name is…"

"Jacob Taylor. I know. How did I get here?"

Jacob raised an eyebrow. "You were born," he replied, as if that explained everything.

"Funny," she said, though she didn't feel amused. "Where am I, and who the hell are you people?"

Jacob frowned. "What's the last thing you remember?"

_**Pain.**_

_**Voices.**_

_**Fire.**_

She clenched her eyes shut. She'd been… she'd been on the Temple Ship. No. That was wrong. She'd been on the Normandy. Off-duty hours in her quarters. With Liara. Pressley had the bridge, and she wasn't supposed to go on shift until 0800. She remembered falling asleep in Liara's arms. Her warmth. Liara's body against hers. The strange but not unpleasant texture of Asari skin.

"... I was on the Normandy," she muttered.

Jacob nodded. "Right. Do you remember what happened?"

An explosion. There'd been an explosion in engineering. People had been killed. Her people. They'd lost power. Gone to emergency backups. Tali and Adams had said…

She couldn't remember. Wait. Wait. … Tali and Adams had said all evidence pointed to sabotage. Then there'd been an alien ship. "We were sabotaged," she said. "And then ambushed. We didn't recognize the ship. Our shields were down. Nothing but emergency power. We still made them pay for it. I remember…"

Floating in space. Her hardsuit leaking air. The Normandy and the alien ship both glowing somewhere below her with the light of re-entry. The two ships had slain each other, but her crew had made it to the escape pods. Liara and Jeff and Ashley and…

It hit her with a shocking suddenness. "I died."

Jacob nodded. "Yes. You died."

"Why am I alive?"

Jacob didn't quite smile at that. "Good question. If you figure that one out, you let me know."

She shot him an irritated look, and he held up a hand defensively. "All right, all right," he said. "We brought you back. It was called the Lazarus project. I don't have the clearance to tell you more. Miranda can explain it when we get to the shuttles. She's the one in charge."

Miranda. The woman who'd been directing her through the commlink, earlier?

Shepard met his gaze. "I could take it from you," she said.

"You could," Jacob said. "I'd fight."

"You'd lose."

Jacob nodded. "I would. I guess you have to ask yourself, is Commander Shepard the kind of person who's willing to rip through someone's brain for answers because she's impatient?"

She looked away. Damn him. "Fine. Let's go."

They went. It wasn't a large station, and there was no sign of the second telepath - the one who had controlled Richard Jones. There was, however, a trail of bodies. Dozens of dead. Some men, some women. Most of them were in the same grey jumpsuit she'd woken up with. There were two security checkpoints: four guards at once, two at the second. When they reached the second, Jacob seemed to sink into himself and looked away.

So. This was where he'd been stationed. There was storage space here for four MEC suits. Two of the pods were empty. Two dead cyborgs on the floor. The technology had advanced considerably since the first cyborgs in the days of the First Contact War: their mechanical arms and legs were indistinguishable from the real thing until you detached them. One of them was a man with salt-and-pepper hair and kind eyes still open in death, a look of complete surprise on his face. The other was a blonde woman who still clutched a combat knife in her hand. There were defensive wounds all over her arms and hands: she'd gone down hard.

"Shepard, you mind?" Jacob asked. "I'd do it myself, but…" he held up the oversized hands of his Mechanized Exoskeletal Cybersuit.

Shepard knelt down beside each body in turn, closed their eyes, and took their dog tags.

Jacob shut his eyes, murmured something, then opened them again. "Thanks," he said. "Come on. The shuttles aren't far."

There was another body in the launch bay.

"Wilson," Jacob muttered.

"Friend of yours?" Shepard asked.

"No. Kind of a prick. I didn't kill him, though. We made a beeline for you."

"I did," said a familiar voice. A woman's voice. Shepard looked up as a woman with long black hair and blue eyes stepped out of the shuttle. She was stunning, and her form-fitting black uniform only emphasized that further. "There's your second telepath," she said. "Come on. The other shuttles have already lifted off. We're the last ones out." She went back in, and Shepard and Jacob followed.

"Before you meet with my superiors, I need to ask you a few..."

"Take a nap," Shepard said, interrupting Miranda and letting her power flare. It showed in her eyes: a dark purple light. Jacob went unconscious.

"Ah," Miranda said. "I suppose you object to meeting with my superiors, then?"

Shepard smirked ever so slightly. "You suppose correctly. As grateful as I am to inexplicably not be dead, I don't care who your boss is or what they have to say. You're well funded, but you're definitely not Alliance military, and the only other group I can think of that could pull something like this off is EXALT. I'm not working with terrorists, and EXALT are some of the worst. So here's how this is going to work, Miranda: you can either plot a course to the nearest alliance station, or I can shoot you and do it myself."

Miranda stared at the barrel of the gun pointed at her head, but it wasn't fear in her eyes: she seemed... hurt? Hurt. Betrayed, even. "Shepard, please, we really are the good guys here. If you'll just let him, my boss will explain every..."

"Alliance station or death. This isn't complicated."

Miranda sighed. "Laying in a course." Her hands moved across the holographic controls, and the hum of the engine increased. A moment later, the shuttle hit FTL. As the stars streaked by outside the window, Miranda turned to look at the other woman. "We'll be arriving at Elysium in seven hours. We've got time. Are you willing to hear my explanation now?"

Jane Shepard waved her hand in a vaguely permissive gesture, but didn't lower her gun.

"The first thing you should know is that I'm not with EXALT."

Shepard shrugged. "We'll see."

Miranda winced. "The situation is a bit more complicated than you think."

"Un-complicate it for me."

"How much do you know about the First Contact War?"

Shepard raised an eyebrow. "Invasion of Earth by a group of alien races wielding 'unconventional, non-eezo based technologies.' Lasted for three years before Coalition forces managed to infiltrate and destroy the alien flagship over South America. Led to our technological revolution even with us initially unable to replicate alien materials or fuel sources. It was also the first time psionic humans were fielded in a battlefield "

Miranda didn't quite roll her eyes. "You're a credit to your omni-tool's extranet search function. Do you recall the name of the coalition combat force that led the fight?"

Shepard stared for a split-second, and then, "Bullshit. X-COM was disbanded after the war."

"That's what we told the public, yes. God knows it would have been difficult to justify continuing at full strength. But somebody needed to keep watch against any possible return of the Ethereals or their minions. Someone needed to stand guard. Just before it was officially disbanded, each of the member nations of the X-COM Alliance agreed to contribute a small amount to maintain our organization in perpetuity. That plus our ownership of the patent rights for all of the new technology has kept us in business ever since."

"Does the Alliance know about you?

"The top brass. A few others."

Shepard frowned. "I saw the logs. You could have built an army for the cost of bringing me back."

"That's true. But you were only the prototype. The testbed, if you will. If this Reaper threat of yours proves as serious as you claimed in your report to the Council..." Miranda shrugged.

"I assume you have some kind of proof to back up these claims with."

"On my person?" Miranda asked. "No. I didn't anticipate the need to do so when I got up this morning. But I can get you that proof once we reach Elysium, assuming we're not arrested and disappeared by System Alliance Intelligence."

"All right. You're either a really creative EXALT Agent or a member of what's supposed to be a long dead secret army, and I'm some kind of cyborg zombie. What could they possibly object to?"

Miranda didn't quite smile. "You're hardly a zombie, Shepard. Give me some credit. You're alive - I saw to that. Take it for what it is." She let a beat pass. "Though we really do need to do some testing to make sure that everything's intact."

"I'm intact," Jane said.

_**Pain.**_

_**Voices.**_

A spike of agony seemed to burn its way through her brain, and it hit her like a physical blow, followed soon after by the sensation of something _crawling_ inside her skull. Jane's aim wavered. She clenched her eyes shut. "... Ugh. OK. Mostly intact."

Miranda sat up, her bearing suddenly completely professional. "What symptoms have you been experiencing?"

Shepard shook her head, her senses coming back to her, pain fading, the gun coming back into position. "Look, until you show me that proof, I'm still working with the assumption that you're a really, really creative EXALT agent. So no offense, but shut up and fly the damn shuttle, OK?"

"... Fine."

_**Pain.**_

Her vision blurred. Her head throbbed. The shuttle around her was getting...

_dark_

* * *

Rapid eye movement beneath eyelids clenched shut. Pale skin. Red hair streaked with sweat. Her chest rose and fell.

Fire raced along the ceiling, along the wall. Heat upon heat upon heat. The screams of civilians. A dark purple blur and a hunting cry. Private Du Lac got off a shot before it took him. It happened so fast she almost missed it: the resounding boom of the shotgun's discharge, the explosion of wood splinters as the shot missed its mark, a flash of scythe-bladed legs and ripping mandibles. It planted its young in his chest before she even had the chance to raise her own shotgun.

They were coming. Monsters swarmed through the building, and everywhere she looked she saw another set of glowing yellow eyes. Monstrous, hybrid metal flying things came up behind them, spraying their weapons wildly. A woman screamed in vain denial as a monster pounced down from the burning staircase and pinned her to the floor. Her son almost to the open double doors, stopped short, had just enough time to call for her mother before a bolt of green plasma turned the little boy into a shrieking human torch. His mother's screams of horror didn't echo long.

They were pinned down. Terror rose up like a cloud. She was screaming her mad challenge to the gods as she fired her shotgun into the oncoming swarm, again, and again, and again. Du Lac was getting up. It would burst out of his chest in another fifteen seconds. She put an end to that with her gun, and to him as well.

Only Onyx and Nitro seemed immune to the general panic in their positions on the roof of the building across the street, calmly drawing a bead on the next creature, and the next, and the next, an x-ray falling every time their sniper rifles spoke, the steady beat of their gunshots providing regular punctuation to the staccato chaos of the battle. Together, they seemed a god and a goddess of war, working death upon the battlefield in tandem, every movement perfectly synchronized.

Her gun clicked empty. A monster leaped down from the upper level. The sound of a rifle. Something dark and purple that stank of burning insect crushed her to the ground, and she knew no more.

She didn't know how long it was. Someone was shaking her body, and a distant woman's voice "You alive, soldier?"

The world swam back into focus. The reek of burning bodies was thick in the air. The fire had died. Onyx was kneeling over her, and a new, bloody gash traced the line of sniper's face. The world seemed silent as death. She looked about her, taking in the sheer, mad destruction, the burned, torn, slashed remnants that had once been living, breathing humans that littered what had been a hotel lobby. She had just enough sense to roll over onto her side before she vomited noisily onto the floor.

"Yeah, that's about how I handled my first mission, too," Onyx said. There was no humor in her voice. "But you survived your first mission. Congratulations. Most don't."

"The squad?" she asked.

Onyx shrugged, and the world around her grew dim. Her voice seemed speaking from further and further away. "Nitro might keep his leg. Even odds. Everyone else is dead." Something cool and wet was being pressed onto her forehead. Someone was holding her hand.

Onyx faded into darkness. Shepard's eyes fluttered open. She was in an infirmary. Lying on a bed. She wasn't armored anymore - hospital gown? Hospital gown. There was a wet cloth on her forehead. Lights were shining in her eyes. Someone was checking her pupillary response.

"Where..." she began only for a string of coughs to take her words. She tried again, "Where are we?"

Miranda was holding her hand. She had a pen-light in the other. "We've got you, Shepard. You're on Elysium. You're at an Alliance hospital. Don't try to move."

Alliance hospital? She'd lost consciousness? Then why hadn't Miranda taken her back to her organization as soon as the gun was no longer pointed at her? "Prove it." she said, and twisted her hand out of Miranda's grip.

Miranda raised an eyebrow. "What would convince you?"

She thought about that. "Captain Anderson or Admiral Hackett walking through that door."

Miranda didn't smile, but her amusement was still obvious. "I'll see what I can arrange, Commander. Until then, you need to rest."

Shepard grimaced as a dream-memory came back to her suddenly, bringing with it an almost overwhelming sense of nausea that was slow in fading. She dry-heaved; there wasn't anything in her stomach. The last time she'd eaten had been dinner with Liara. All she'd had since then was water. "What's wrong with me?" she asked.

"You mean besides having been dead for two years?" Miranda asked.

Shepard looked up in shock. "Two years?" That sank in. Dead. Two years dead. Two years in the blink of an eye. In the time it had taken her to close them and open them again. She looked down at her hands.

Miranda didn't say anything.

Her heartbeat was like thunder in her ears. Her gorge rose, and her tongue felt weirdly heavy in her mouth. She took slow, deep breaths as she fought off the nausea. "Yeah," she said at length. "Besides that."

Miranda's tone was a gentle one when she went on. "The procedure we used to bring you back was experimental. You were the test-bed for resurrection technology. Honestly, we thought we'd have more luck with…" She trailed off. "Not important. There may be side-effects beyond what we could easily predict. It could be incredibly dangerous for you, and I need you to tell me if you start experiencing anything unusual."

Then the door opened with a faint hiss, and a doctor walked into the room. He looked young, but his eyes gave lie to that. He wore a white lab coat over his uniform, and two marines came in with him in full tactical battledress, each with a plasma rifle slung from the shoulder, though neither had their hands on the trigger. Both of the marines were psions. Probably telepaths, if the shared look of recognition in their eyes when they saw her was any indication.

Before the door shut, Shepard had time to see that the hallway outside was conspicously empty. Which meant there probably more marines just past her sight-line.

The doctor didn't smile. He looked downright grouchy, actually. It was the sort of expression that worked well on the face of an old man, but not the young man he looked like. He'd probably Reverted recently. It was something people went through every twenty to twenty five years; one of the bounties which humanity had reaped from the long effort to understand the technology of the Ethereals was a very strange cure for aging. As it turned out, preventing a person from aging was basically impossible. But reversing the aging process? That was entirely doable. So people lived their lives, and every couple of decades the Meld that helped to fortify their bodies against disease and injury and maintained whatever gene-mods and cybernetic implants they'd chosen reset the clock on the Hayflick limit and rejuvenated their body over the course of an awkward and uncomfortable month to a state of perfect health at physical maturity. You could still die, of course. You just wouldn't die of old age. Jane was a member of the first generation born after Reversion became available to the public.

"Doctor," Jane said.

"Commander Jane Shepard," the doctor said. "Service number 5923-AC-2826. Killed in action July 17, 2183 CE." He didn't quite smirk, but there was a twinkle in his eye. "Well," he said. "Isn't this awkward."

It took the better part of a week before the medical staff was convinced that this was, in fact, Commander Shepard and not an imposter, clone, or some kind of holographic field. Jane spent that time being subjected to test after test after test after test. A few times, they brought in telepaths to examine her. Specialists with security clearances beyond all reason. Those were the worst: the sense of something crawling inside her head always spiked, then, and the nausea, and the pain. At least she hadn't been experiencing any more of those strange flashes of ... of someone else's life.

She didn't know what they'd done with Miranda..

Then they brought her out to a waiting room. White and sterile. Holo-displays that didn't add warmth. Faux-wood chairs arranged along the walls, and a row of them back to back down the middle.

Captain Anderson was waiting for her there, in the otherwise empty waiting room. He stared at her when he saw her, and she saw a mixture of complicated emotions pass across his face. She could have looked into his mind to see what he was thinking, but she wouldn't do that: not to him.

At the sight of her former Captain, a knot in Jane's stomach seemed to unclench. A burden she hadn't known she was bearing seemed to fall away.

"Shepard," he said with a tone of wonder. "As I live and breathe. They said you were dead."

"I was," Jane replied. "I got better."

He laughed, and clapped her on the arm. "Welcome back, soldier. My God but it's good to see you again."

And then Jane couldn't keep a straight face, either. She grinned. "The feeling's mutual, sir." She let out a breath. "My crew? Liara?"

"Alive," Anderson said. "There was an official investigation into what happened. I won't lie to you, Shepard: it got ugly. Especially for the aliens you'd brought aboard. Admiral Hackett and I had to intervene personally, and even then, mandatory mind-scans for everyone involved."

Jane's eyes narrowed.

Anderson held up a hand. "Liara's fine. She's on Illium."

Jane nodded. "Tali?"

"Went back to her people. I don't know the details, but a few months after she returned to the Migrant fleet, the Quarians asked permission to establish an embassy." He shook his head. "Hell of a thing. I've heard they're set up near the Asari embassy on Terra Nova."

He was avoiding the obvious. The thing he had to know she wanted to hear. "Did they find the culprit?" she asked.

He hesitated. "... You're not going to like it."

"Sir?"

Anderson frowned. "Do you remember what happened?" he asked.

"I remember there was an explosion. We fought them off with nothing but emergency backups. I…" Jane trailed off, frowning.

"Think of the ship you fought. The one that went down alongside the Normandy. What did it look like?"

She… couldn't remember. There weren't any details. She knew it had been there. Hell, she'd seen it on the sensor display! But when she tried to bring up specific details about the ship, it was just this empty grey space. Chills went up and down Jane's spine. "I don't…" she looked up. "I don't remember, sir."

Anderson nodded, as if he'd expected that. "Neither does anyone else from the Normandy. I shouldn't say more."

"Why not?"

The door opened with a faint hiss. "Because," Miranda Lawson said as she stepped into the room, "That is my job." She wore a fresh uniform, and showed no sign of distress: wherever she'd been for the past week, it hadn't been the brig. She approached the pair of them. "Let's start this over, shall we?" She held out a hand. "Miranda Lawson. Lazarus Project lead. X-COM research and development. Are you satisfied, Commander Shepard?"

Satisfied? She'd asked for Captain Anderson or Admiral Hackett. Captain Anderson had come. Jane shook Miranda's hand. "All right," she said. "I believe you. And test-bed for the technology or not, I'm sure you brought me back for a reason. What do you want from me?"

Miranda smiled, but there was little warmth in it. "I want you to help us save the human race."

"...Ah."

End Chapter 01

Codex: EXALT

Originally formed during the First Contact War, EXALT was a traitorous paramilitary organization which came into conflict with, and was ultimately destroyed by, X-COM. Records of the original organization are sparse, but what evidence is available suggests that they were not allied with nor cooperating with the Ethereals, but were directly opposed to X-COM's efforts nonetheless, using the chaos of the alien invasion for their own benefit as they sought to seize power and to advance a distinctly transhuman agenda. EXALT has been reformed several times since the First Contact War. In all cases to date the group has been rooted out and destroyed by the Alliance military within a year of their becoming aware of the existence of a new EXALT, usually followed by the arrest, trial, and execution of its sponsors.


	2. XCOM

Smoke on the Water  
by P.H. Wise

A Mass Effect/XCOM Crossover Fanfic

Chapter 02: X-COM

Disclaimer: I own neither Mass Effect (EA) nor XCOM (God only knows).

* * *

Miranda produced a tiny device about the size of an old American quarter and activated it. It emitted a sound that quickly rose above the human range of hearing - or even the expanded human range, now that gene-mods were readily available to the public. She took a few moments to scan the room. "You'll have to forgive me, Shepard," she said. "We've made this hospital as secure as we could in what time we've had, but I'd rather not take any chances. Would you mind securing the room against telepathic eavesdroppers?"

Shepard nodded. "Sure," she said, and, with a moment's concentration and after a quick glimpse at both Captain Anderson and Miranda's minds to make sure nobody was already riding sidecar, she sent out a pulse of telepathic white noise. She allowed her mind to compartmentalize the activity, setting part of it to maintain the pulse while the rest of her directed its attention at Miranda and what she had to say. "We're good," she said.

Miranda nodded. "Very well. The abductions began about a year ago. It started small. A few minor raids on isolated settlements in the Traverse. At first we thought it was part of the Batarian remnant that we missed in the war. You remember how they worked before Elysium: a raid here and there, never hitting any system with established defenses, always the tiny independent colonies, testing our reaction time, always trying for settlements that weren't cost-effective to defend, operating entire fleets of bloody privateers."

"I take it it's not a Batarian remnant?" Jane asked. It was unlikely. She'd been a raw Lieutenant during the Batarian War, fresh out of officer training school. Hell, she'd been on Elysium when the Batarians had hit it. Elysium had been in the middle of a major upgrade to its defense systems to account for the capabilities of alien FTL technology. Every colony had been getting such an upgrade, but Elysium had been one of the last on the list. In retrospect, it probably should have been one of the first. A few slaver ships had been taken down by defense satellites, a few more by AA fire, but most got through. One of the slaver ships had been damaged and was forced to make an emergency landing landed on a high security research facility where a team of scientists had been… well, she still didn't know all the details, but they'd had live Chryssalids on site, and the Batarians blew right through the failsafes intended to destroy all live samples in the event of a breach. … and the backup failsafes intended to permanently seal off the facility. And the secondary backup failsafes intended to flood the facility with napalm. Things had gotten very bad on Elysium after that. The Alliance had won the day, and she'd played a major part in that, but it wasn't a good memory; the Batarians had their own name for Elysium, now: it translated roughly to, 'the skittering death.'

Miranda shook her head. "A Batarian remnant would be easy. We could sort that out in an afternoon. This is something else." She activated her omni-tool and brought up an image. A holographic image at once familiar and troubling sprang up in the air above her wrist: a ship that was not a ship. A grey, empty void where a ship should be.

Jane focused; she brought all of her concentration to bear, and she thought she could just make out a smooth, grey, sweeping hull and a light that was vaguely suggestive of… even as she looked, the image shimmered like a migraine-aura. It was gone. Her head hurt. All that remained was the empty grey.

Captain Anderson's eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

Miranda scowled, "Two months ago, they stepped up their efforts. Instead of abducting people from outlying, isolated settlements, they started taking entire colonies. It's still small independent worlds outside of the Alliance's sphere of influence. Frontier worlds. Real hard-scrabble types. The ships come, and signals stop, and then everyone is just gone. They haven't come near any of the core worlds yet, and they haven't hit anywhere with defenses to speak of, but humanity's lost three frontier colonies in two months, and that's three too many. For obvious reasons, we're calling these ships 'Greys.' We don't know who's behind them, but we mean to find out."

Shepard looked to Anderson, and Anderson nodded. "All of that tracks with what we've been hearing in the fleet," he said. "People disappearing. Frontier worlds going dark. Ghost ships. There's been a lot of rumors flying around since the Normandy went down."

'_And we're sure XCOM is real, sir?_' Shepard asked telepathically. '_This isn't some new incarnation of EXALT? And assuming it does exist, Miranda Lawson really is with X-COM?'_

'I didn't know about them before I was briefed on the matter by Admiral Hackett,' Anderson thought, 'But they're very real, Shepard. Ms. Lawson is on the level.'

Shepard glanced at Miranda. The woman had reasonable mental discipline, and didn't let much leak through to where a telepath could get at it without an active scan.

"So," Miranda said. "You in?"

"What do you need me to do, exactly?" Shepard asked.

"We need you to lead a mission to investigate, disrupt, and destroy the grey ships and whoever is behind them," Miranda replied.

On the surface that sounded reasonable, but when she gave it some thought, some oddities became apparent. "Why me? You've got operatives of your own."

"True," Miranda replied. "And yours won't be the only ship we're sending to abduction sites. It's a big galaxy, and one ship can't be in two places at once. But you underestimate your usefulness. You're a capable officer. You made it through N7 training. You've got command experience in both ship-to-ship engagements and ground battles. But beyond that, none of our operatives are living symbols of humanity's potential. None of our operatives personally led the mission that avenged Eden Prime, took down the Turian responsible, and was instrumental in thwarting a Geth invasion of the Citadel." Miranda smirked. "Arranging for the Alliance 5th fleet to ride to the rescue was a particularly inspired touch."

"There are over thirteen million civilians on the the Citadel at any given time," Shepard replied. "I couldn't let them die when I had the means to prevent it. Not to mention, if Saren had succeeded, we would be hip deep in Reapers right now, assuming we weren't dead already."

"Whatever your reasons," Miranda said, "We aren't going to argue with the results. They owe us, and they know it."

"And I made their Spectres look like fools," Shepard said.

"And you made their Spectres look like fools," Miranda agreed cheerfully. "But the point is, you're a hero, Shepard. Not just to humanity, but to the Citadel races as well. We can use that."

"I remember that part." Shepard said, and snorted. "Hero of the Citadel. Rear Admiral Mikhailovich was lobbying to have me dishonorably discharged for that. He called the Fifth Fleet's intervention, 'A shameful misuse of human lives and resources.'"

"Mikhailovich is just one hard-line human supremacist," Anderson said dismissively.

"We've got a lot of those, sir," Shepard said.

"Yes," Anderson said, "But the majority of the admiralty knows better."

Shepard raised an eyebrow. "Just how close did I come to disciplinary action, sir?"

"Close," Anderson conceded.

Miranda coughed, getting their attention. "What's it going to be, Commander?"

Jane thought about it, and Miranda let her. After about ten seconds had passed, Jane nodded. "I will not be a figurehead," she said. "If you are putting me in charge of this mission, then I expect to actually be in charge of this mission."

"That won't be a problem," Miranda said.

"I had a good team and a good crew. I want as many of them back as I can get."

Miranda looked at Anderson, and Anderson nodded. "Very well," Miranda replied, "Provided they can meet our training standards, pass the requisite background and security checks, and agree to be transferred to your command. Anything else, Commander?"

Jane shook her head. "No," she said. "I'm in."

"Good," Miranda said. "You'll have a week to get reacclimated to being alive. During that time, the public will be informed of your return. Then you're to report to Cydonia where you will be evaluated for service in the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit."

Jane raised an eyebrow. "Evaluated?"

"XCOM accepts only the best, Commander," Miranda said. Everyone goes through this when they join the program, but I'm confident you will do well. Assuming everything goes according to plan, your new ship will be fully provisioned and ready for you by the time you finish." At Shepard's questioning look, Miranda smiled. "You spent almost a year commanding the most advanced ship in the galaxy. A prototype stealth ship with, ton for ton, better shields, weapons, and armor than anything else in the Alliance Navy. Did you ever wonder why you never saw the production model?"

Shepard blinked. "Are you serious?"

"Perfectly serious," Miranda replied. Her comm beeped, and she glanced at her omni-tool. "If that's all, I'll be off. Good luck, Shepard."

After Miranda had left, Jane turned to Captain Anderson. "What do you think?" she asked.

Anderson shook his head bemusedly. "I think you had better sneak out before the reporters hear you're alive. Hero of the citadel back from the dead is a hell of a story."

Ugh. Was it too much to hope that Khalisah al-Jilani wouldn't be one of the reporters assigned to the story? 'Probably,' she decided upon reflection. "Right," Jane said. "I should go." She turned.

"Shepard?"

She paused, looking back over her shoulder at Captain Anderson. "Sir?"

"Good luck."

Jane smiled mostly with her eyes. "Thank you, sir."

* * *

Turned out, coming back from the dead was a big deal. Jane Shepard's return was the lead story on the Alliance News Network for the entire week after her release from the hospital, and given that the Alliance had only confirmed that she was alive and not the circumstances surrounding that fact, speculation was rampant. Some suggested that she'd been on a deep cover mission somewhere. One pundit suggested that perhaps she had been injured or otherwise incapacitated, though there were few injuries these days that required even a month of hospitalization, much less two years. Others were less charitable, and conspiracy theories abounded. She let them. She had bigger things to worry about, the biggest of which was the fact that she'd been **dead**.

Jane had never been a particularly religious person. She'd entertained some vague notion of a hereafter, an afterlife, something, but never anything concrete, but when she'd been dead… there was nothing. She could remember floating in space after the battle with the Grey Ship, her armor leaking air. It had felt like… like going to sleep, maybe. She remembered being sleepy. The adrenaline of battle fading. She remembered thinking, 'I am going to die.' But it was all right. Her crew had gotten out alive. Liara was alive. She remembered making telepathic contact with Liara, whispering an "I love you" before she couldn't sustain the connection any longer. Then…

_**Pain**_

_**Voices**_

_**Silence**_

She'd been… somewhere. There was a purple orb? The earth seen from orbit? A flicker of she wasn't sure what. When she'd woken up on that table, it hadn't felt like resurrection. Not that she had any idea what resurrection should feel like, but it had felt like... waking up. Certainly she didn't remember having been in any kind of Heaven or Hell. Then again, would she remember something like that? All her memories were stored in her brain, after all, and that brain had been with her body. If there was such a thing as a soul, Jane didn't know. It felt a little like being cheated not knowing the answer to that after having died and come back to life

It kept her up at night. That and the nightmares. Dreams of… the first contact war? It looked similar to some of the declassified vids she'd seen that had survived from that era. She found herself wondering why the Alliance telepaths who had examined her on Elysium hadn't seen that. She hadn't volunteered it, but they should have noticed. They hadn't. She had ideas about it. Maybe the Prothean Cipher in her head made her sufficiently alien to them that they couldn't correctly interpret what they saw? Maybe they HAD seen, and her sense that the door to those memories had remained shut was a delusion. But if that was the case, why hadn't they reported it?

She had too many questions without answers.

For that matter, how the hell did you just message people - people you cared about - right out of the blue to tell them, "Hey Liara, remember me? Turns out I'm not dead after all!"

… OK, so maybe she was having a harder time with this than she was comfortable admitting.

Jane spent five days in transit aboard the Santa Maria. It was a military transport ship, and an older model, but serviceable enough; Erewhon class transports like this one had seen extensive use in both the Second Contact and the Batarian wars as a vital part of fleet logistics. It wasn't glamorous, but it was safe and reliable, and that accounted for a great deal of its enduring popularity. It was about a kilometer long - a size unheard of outside of dreadnoughts in Citadel fleets - and it was a bulky, unelegant thing. Outside her little cabin, the ship had hummed with the peculiar resonance of hyperspace passage, occasionally interrupted by brief real-space transits to Mass Relays, and the lingering faintly sour smell of an aging water recycling system was an omnipresent if distant thing. The bulk of the journey was spent in hyperspace, the last three of which were continuous: the nearest Mass Relay to Earth was in the Exodus cluster, and although hyperspace was a considerably faster way to travel than the mass-effect based faster-than-light drives, it suffered limitations that Citadel FTL didn't have, and there was still a great deal of distance to cross. Supposedly, the Alliance Senate was debating whether or not Earth should construct its own Mass Relay out near the orbit of Pluto, but that had been argued off and on since Second Contact, and no one expected it to go anywhere anytime soon.

She had time to work on her physical training, to read over the material she'd been sent about the current state of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, and to decompress over the course of the voyage. And time for other worries. Too many of them, it felt like.

On the fifth day, the Santa Maria reached the outskirts of Sol. The delicate gravity bubble that kept a ship safe in hyperspace was disrupted when you got too close to a star system: something to do with the way the bubble interacted with the shadow that real-world gravity cast into hyperspace. With Jupiter at a particularly inconvenient spot in its orbit, they had to cycle down for their emergence into realspace at the hyperlimit about 45 AU out from Sol. The ship's gravity wave drives would take her the rest of the way to Earth, but Shepard wouldn't be on it: Gagarin Station at Pluto was her destination, and from there to take a quick hop in-system on an eezo powered FTL shuttlecraft - outside of wartime or emergency, eezo was just too rare and too expensive in Alliance space to waste moving a ship the size of the Santa Maria when it moved smaller vessels much more cost-effectively.

It wasn't a long journey. She got on the shuttle, it lifted off, it left Gagarin Station behind, it went to FTL. Ten minutes later, Mars hung in the forward viewscreen, and Shepard's heart lifted at the sight. Once, Mars had been a forbidding place, a world of reddish dust and lethal sandstorms. Today a third of the planet was covered in water, and though red-soiled deserts were a common sight, so too were vast, rolling plains, snow-clad mountains, and great forests: the product of over a hundred years of terraforming with Ethereal technology. The shuttle descended through the Martian atmosphere, and she watched as the world got bigger and bigger below her. Presently, the shuttle landed at the Aldrin Naval Base; Shepard gathered her things, nodded her thanks to the pilot, and headed down the ramp to where her contact would be waiting.

It was raining at Cydonia when they started two days later. Jane could hear the sound of the waves and the regular clatter of the little rocks on the beach as they shifted in time with those waves. The entrance to the XCOM compound stood on a cliff overlooking the the Acidalian Sea. It didn't look like much from the outside: just a tiny little fenced off settlement out in the middle of nowhere. Most of it was underground, and their ships came and went through submarine bays connected to the main base by a series of underground passages. The began outside the base, in the outer settlement's main courtyard, a holo-field hiding their presence for any who might look upon them from outside; twenty four people, Shepard among them, were gathered before a handful of severe looking trainers.

"Welcome to the XCOM training and evaluation center," one of the trainers said. He was at least part Chinese, extremely fit, dressed in an XCOM uniform, and his voice was surprisingly pleasant. "There are three possible outcomes to this evaluation. You pass and are admitted into our organization, you qualify for additional training and reevaluation, or you go home. You will be divided into four six-man squads. You will each be tested individually and as a team. We fully expect that out of the whole of you, perhaps two or three will qualify to train here with us until you meet XCOM standards. My name is Kai Leng. But for the duration of this evaluation, you may call me God."

* * *

They could hear the screams before the Skyranger's rear door opened. The sound of people screaming in complete and utter terror. It was mingled with other, inhuman shrieks. It was a sound at once familiar to Jane; she had often heard it in her dreams after Elysium, and every night since her resurrection: the hunting cry of a Cryssalid. She and five other XCOM recruits, armed with weapons and armor so primitive that they barely deserved the name, She was the only woman in the group, and only one of two Alliance personnel.

The door opened, and Jane felt the cold thrill of adrenaline. It was night in Union Square, and the St. Francis hotel was burning. "Go," Jane ordered.

They moved out. Two took up a covering position at the base of the ramp as she and the other three moved out. The alien Terror Vessel was gone, now - driven off by three XCOM interceptors working in tandem, but its cargo - a dozen floaters riding herd on two pods of Cryssalids - had been loose in downtown San Francisco for half an hour before the XCOM strike team arrived.

There were a lot more Chryssalids, now.

A dozen of the black and purple nightmares came shrieking out of the St. Francis' lobby, Shepard's team took cover at the monument at the heart of the square, only a few dozen yards from where Big Sky had set them down, and although their courage was tested, she would be damned before she'd let them break. "Grenades," she ordered. "Full spread. Get ready."

Each of them produced a frag grenade. The purple and black swarm skittered on, closing the distance between them with alarming speed. "NOW!" Shepard yelled

As one, Shepard and three of her squadmates threw their grenades. Each grenade landed well short of the oncoming swarm, but the rate at which they were covering the ground made up for that. The grenades exploded just as the Chryssalids reached them, and though the creatures could survive individual explosions, they did less well against multiple overlapping blasts. One Chryssalid made it through intact. It rushed directly for her, letting out its uncanny hunting howl as it went. Shepard fell back, raising her shotgun even as its bladed claws swung for her.

Gunfire sounded behind her: the two men on either side of the Skyranger's ramp opened fire, and their bullets ripped through the already wounded Chryssalid's exoskeleton, tearing the creature apart. It collapsed in a heap, twitched, and died.

Shepard let out a breath. They had survived the initial landing. So far so good.

It got worse from there. She had Private Anderson - her team's radio operator - link them up with local emergency responders. The police were working to cordon of all of Union Square, but the first few officers on the scene had died to alien plasma fire from a pair of Floater snipers up on the seventh floor of the hotel. Worse, that gave them an ideal position from which to fire on her squad as they approached the building. She considered the matter for a moment.

"Vega," she said, glancing at the Lieutenant to her left, "You're telekinetic, right?"

Vega was a thickly muscled man, hispanic, and the only other Alliance soldier on the team. "Sure," he said. "But we aren't supposed to use…"

Shepard concentrated for a moment, linking each of her team members telepathically. It wasn't quite a hive-mind, but it was close. The awareness of each squad member popped up adjacent to but distinct from her own. '_All right,'_ she sent over the link. '_When we cross the ground between here and the hotel, I want a telekinetic barrier protecting us the whole way. Be ready for Chryssalids, but leave any floaters to me.I'll make them see things our way.'_

"With all due respect, Ma'am," Lieutenant Vega said, "Isn't that cheating? If we start using our abilities, we're not really fighting the way XCOM did back in the day. Not to mention, it won't exactly be an unfair fight."

Shepard didn't roll her eyes: that would have been the wrong response. Instead, she met his gaze unflinching, every word filled with the surety of authority. "It's not cheating to make use of your soldiers' capabilities in battle, Lieutenant," she said. "And if at any point you find yourself in a fair fight, somebody screwed up. Probably you."

Lieutenant Vega grinned. "Whatever you say, Lola," he said.

"Barrier. Now. We move in three. Two. One."

Vega put up the barrier, and the squad moved out. Sniper fire from the seventh floor went wide thanks to the mobile telekinetic shield. A Floater tossed a plasma grenade down on them when they got beneath the window, but Shepard gestured and used her own limited telekinetic abilities to send it back the way it had come. The dying screams of the two Floaters were very brief.

From there, the whole thing turned into a bug hunt. It was grueling, hunting down Floaters and Chryssalids floor by floor, sealing off accessways, getting civilians out, setting up to make sure they were never blindsided by either Chryssalids or Floaters - they wouldn't survive either instance with the equipment they had. But six hours later, they had cleared out the last Chryssalid and every floater lay dead, Jane had kept her entire squad alive, and they'd only lost three hundred civilians.

The simulation ended. San Francisco derezzed. Shepard awoke inside her VR pod, the neural interface bands de-clamping from either side of her head even as the pod opened and she sat up. A woman was there to help her up, and she took the hand that was offered. Then Shepard stretched, nodded to Vega and her other squadmates, and walked out of the chamber.

Kai Leng was waiting for her in the hall. Arms folded across his chest, his eyes inscrutable as he regarded her. "Commander Shepard," he said. "Walk with me." She did. They had been walking through the halls of the XCOM base for almost a minute, and were far distant from any potential eavesdroppers when Kai Leng said, "Please explain why you took it upon yourself to wield psionic abilities against the aliens in our simulation when the clear intent of the exercise was to put you into the shoes of the original XCOM squads."

Jane regarded the man calmly. "Because our ability to function with antiquated technology is not what was being tested in that scenario," she told him. "We were sent into the simulator, given weapons barely worthy of the name, and told that we would be running through XCOM's response to the first Alien Terror attack of the First Contact War. At no point were we ever ordered not to use such abilities. In fact, we were told to win by any means necessary. We did."

Kai Leng smirked. "You would be shocked how few ever realize that," he said. "Given your reputation as the idealistic 'hero of the Citadel,' I didn't expect that you would. I underestimated you. It will not happen again."

Jane nodded in acknowledgement.

"Do you know the actual outcome of that Terror Mission in the First Contact war, Commander?" Kai Leng asked.

Jane nodded, her expression distant. "They were all killed soon after landing," Jane replied. "The Chryssalid infestation spread throughout the city. All efforts to contain it failed. The American military ended up levelling most of San Francisco with thermobaric weapons to prevent the infestation from spreading further. I remember seeing it on the n…" she hesitated, "On one of the old war documentaries," she amended. She remembered watching it on the news at her sister's house in Lyon. It was the day before… she couldn't quite recall. But that couldn't possibly be right. "It was one of the worst defeats of the First Contact War," she said.

Kai Leng studied her carefully, and Jane was certain that he'd taken more from the conversation than she'd meant to give him. He nodded. "Indeed. Thank you, Shepard. And as one N7 to another, well done."

It went on like that. Tests and more tests. They'd do a mission in the simulator, they'd come out and do testing. Mental acuity. Hand/eye coordination. Never enough time to rest between missions. MELD went a long way towards keeping them functional, but even that had limits. Jackson and Anderson hit the wall at 53 hours. Their performance notably degraded. Their reaction times slowed. They became more liability than asset. They had half an hour between missions to rest. At first, there had been an easy camaraderie between the members of her team - Vega seemed particularly chatty, Shiota was more quiet and focused, but by and large they had all gotten along. Now, every break between missions was spent getting as much rest as possible, and as much sleep. Microsleeps became common. Shepard started feeling it herself around 70 hours. The testing went on for another ten. Then, finally, at 80 hours, they were all congratulated on their performance and told to get some rest.

The instructors began the 'base attack' simulation an hour and a half later.

It was brutal, and few 'survived.' Shepard and Vega were the only ones from her squad who made it to the end. Finally, after it was all over, her evaluation complete and every test passed, and given Kai Leng's reluctant blessing to begin work with XCOM immediately, Jane Shepard fell into a convenient rack and slept for almost 24 hours.

* * *

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised," Miranda said as she reviewed Shepard's test scores. They were perfect. Flawless performance in all tests. Even at the end, 80 hours without sleep, she had come through with a perfect score, and the highest in the entire group of potential recruits. Only one other in the program's history had ever achieved a perfect score: Kai Leng. About the only disappointment that the evaluation group had when it came to Shepard was that her nervous system could not be adapted for biotics with any of the current MELD biotic templates. That was fairly common - only about 20% of the population was compatible with the current biotic templates, though that number's ascent to 100 was only a matter of time. But considering the raw psionic strength that she possessed even without amplifiers of any kind, Miranda felt that she could live without a biotic Shepard for the time being.

"It's to be expected," another woman replied, an almost German - Swiss, maybe? Rhineland? - accent coloring her words. She was older than Miranda, physically in her late forties - older than most people ever allowed themselves to get with access to Reversion. But she had been one of the first to test the process - long before it ever became available to the public - and Dr. Moira Vahlen, head of XCOM Research and Development, and one of only four remaining veterans of the original XCOM project, had always been more comfortable with an older body than a younger. "Particularly if Kai Leng's report is to be believed." Dr. Vahlen sat in a comfortable leather chair in an office that seemed for all the world to be suspended in space, a spectacular view of the Eagle Nebula and its Pillars of Creation spread out behind it, every infrared and ultraviolet color within the stellar nursery visible to the modern human's eye, where a baseline human would only have seen it with the aid of an artist. Miranda took a moment to admire the view.

"Do you like it?" Vahlen asked, gesturing to the backdrop.

"It's lovely," Miranda said.

"A gift from Mr. Harper. He's shown quite a talent for imaginative settings."

Miranda smiled politely. The only Harper she knew of was an extremely capable XCOM intelligence officer. "Of course," she said. Then, "Is there some reason we shouldn't believe Kai Leng's report?" she asked.

"It is a data point, of course," Vahlen said. "But more evidence is required before I will believe that your experiment has succeeded beyond its most basic parameters. I also remain unconvinced that there is any meaningful distinction between Commander Shepard and any of the clones that you used for replacement parts during your project, Miranda. I am open to the possibility, but even if I grant you your greater premise, by its very nature, it will be difficult to reproduce the results."

"The Volunteer was the strongest human psychic to have ever lived, Doctor," Miranda said. "If we can reclaim even part of that potential, discover what made her different, and duplicate that power in others, we may yet stand a chance against the Reapers." Doctor Vahlen made a face, and Miranda looked at her in askance, "You saw the beacon's transmission the same as I," she said.

Vahlen made a dismissive gesture, "It is not their reality that I find distasteful. Only the overly fanciful name. I do not dispute the difficulties in facing a sapient, apparently psionic dreadnought, much less a fleet of them. I simply believe that one should not overly complicate one's experiments. Either way, even with this _Indoctrination _as a factor to consider in our soldiers, Resurrection should prove an extremely useful technology."

"Thank you," Miranda said. "How is your own project coming along, by the way?"

Vahlen smiled. "The Enhanced Defense Intelligence shows great potential. I believe she will be ready when Shepard's mission departs."

Miranda raised an eyebrow. "You're putting her on the SR-2?" she asked.

"It seemed a suitable test bed."

"Now whose experiments are overly complicated?" Miranda asked. Vahlen didn't dignify that with a response. Miranda's omnitool beeped, and she stood up. "Shepard should be arriving any minute now. I'd better go meet her."

Vahlen's expression softened for a split second, and though she'd have missed it if she'd blinked, Miranda didn't - she saw it. "Good luck, Miranda," Vahlen said.

Miranda smiled mostly with her eyes. "Thank you, Doctor," she said.

* * *

Jane Shepard's first view of her new ship came from the back of a UT-47A Kodiak. Viewing her new ship from the passenger hold of the outdated, soon to be phased out shuttle that had transported her from Arcturus might have been a bad omen, but it didn't make it any less impressive. The shuttle had emerged from FTL about a million klicks out from the XCOM shipyard. The shipyard wasn't actually in a solar system - they'd built it in orbit of a rogue planet in interstellar space about 9 light years to the galactic north of Arcturus. The shipyard itself was a massive structure - nearly five kilometers across - and represented a massive logistical undertaking. It had six major berths, and all but one held ships in various stages of construction. Hers was the first.

The new ship was larger than the original Normandy, and less delicate-looking - from her size she was more destroyer than frigate. From prow to stern, she was 170 meters long; not counting the hybrid gravity wave drive's twin nacelles on either side near the ship's stern, its beam was only about 20 meters, though the nacelles more than doubled that. There were no windows. She was painted the same black and white as the original, though the red band had been replaced with blue, and she was every inch a warship: even as Shepard looked, her HUD identified the various point defense laser mounts dotting the hull. The ship had a spinal-mount - probably for a graser - and a pair of plasma cannons facing both fore and aft. She had four missiles tubes, and her broadside consisted of six retractable turrets each: three plasma, three laser. She bore no name: only the designation, 'SR-2,' but when Jane saw her, her heart filled with pride, and she knew what the new ship would be called.

Jane could hear the shuttle's pilot talking to the ship. A moment later, the shuttle quivered as the SR-2's tractor beams drew it into the cargo bay. There was a hiss as the shuttle door opened.

The sound of the bosun's pipe greeted her, with Miranda, Jacob, and - she smothered her surprise - Joker waiting along with a contingent of XCOM troops, all in full uniform. This wasn't strictly an Alliance ship, but XCOM was still military, and there were still formalities to be observed. "Permission to come aboard?" Shepard asked.

"Permission granted," Miranda replied.

Jane stepped out of the shuttle onto the deck of her new Normandy with a glow of pride.

It felt like coming home.

When the ceremony was over,, Joker walked up to her with a grin. "Hey, Commander," he said. "Just like old times, huh?" He offered his hand, and she shook it.

"I can't believe it's you, Joker," Jane said.

"Look who's talking," Joker replied. "I saw you get spaced."

"Apparently," Shepard said, her tone wry, "The only real certainty in life is taxes. Though I've got Miranda to thank for that." She glanced at Miranda, conveying gratitude with her expression.

"Taxes?" Joker asked with false innocence. It was the lead-in to some further joke that was cut off when Miranda said, "Just doing my job, Commander. You're welcome, however."

Jane looked out across the hanger, noting the storage bays for the mechanized assets the ship could deploy: she counted a dozen Seekers, two Sectopods, five SHIVs, and a full complement of drones both for ship repairs and for on-site support of mechanized assets. Not bad.

Jane, Joker, Jacob, and Miranda entered the elevator, and it swiftly carried them up to the CIC in the heart of the ship, where Shepard formally assumed command. She'd had time to read the information brief that XCOM intelligence had prepared for her on the flight over: she knew where the ship was going next. Stations were manned, systems powered up, and all checks completed.

"All right, people," Jane said. "We've got a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it. Comms, are we cleared to leave dock?"

Her comms officer - a professional looking dark haired woman - spoke a few words into her headpiece, then nodded. "We're clear, Captain," she said. Her voice announced her London accent. There was a distant thunk as the docking clamps disengaged.

"Joker, take us out."

There were further introductions after the ship had made the transition into hyperspace. She was still new to her crew, and she needed to meet with the heads of the various sections at least, and there was a great deal of paperwork to do, though there wasn't any actual paper involved. The comms officer was a Lieutenant in the Alliance on loan to XCOM. Her name was Traynor. Miranda would be serving as her XO. Doctor Chakwas had signed on as chief medical officer. And then there was EDI.

EDI waited to introduce herself until Shepard was in the privacy of her quarters reviewing the ship's books at her computer terminal.

"Commander," a woman's voice said. "May I come in?" It sounded slightly artificial, as though being routed through the sort of vocal processor common to MEC troops.

Jane glanced about. Her quarters were only a little larger than what she'd had on the original Normandy, though even that slight increase was a luxury to a woman who had spent her life on one spaceship or another. Her room was a bit sparse at the moment, with only her desk, computer terminal, bed, and closet; the only personal memento was the picture of Liara on the desk. No source of the voice was obvious. "Sure," she said. "Come in."

A woman appeared in front of the door. She was tall and gorgeous, her face utterly without flaw, her pale, wavy hair neck length, her body an ideal balance of defined muscle and pleasant curve, dressed in an XCOM uniform that she filled out extraordinarily well, and she was slightly blue and translucent. Her image gained definition after a few seconds, drawing upon the room's holo-emitter, and she lost the blue translucent effect, gaining definition as if she were physically present.

Jane didn't hide her surprise as well as she'd hoped; the woman smirked ever so slightly. "Hello, Commander," she said. "I feel I should introduce myself. I am the Normandy's artificial intelligence. The crew like to refer to me as EDI."

"The Normandy's artificial intelligence?" Jane asked, an eyebrow raised.

"Yes, Commander," EDI said. "I operate the ship's electronic warfare suite as well as the various unmanned mechanized units. While humanity has signed no treaties limiting the use of AI, my presence could be problematic in Citadel space. I believed it prudent to inform you of this in person. You should find notice of my presence and of my technical specifications in the ship's books."

"Fair enough," Jane said. "Welcome aboard, EDI."

EDI's avatar raised an eyebrow. "I am not newly embarked, Commander. I was installed into the Normandy's systems a week ago."

Jane shook her head bemusedly. "That's not what I meant," she said.

"Ah," EDI said in sudden realization. "You are welcoming me as Captain of the ship. As if I were another member of your crew. Interesting."

"Was there anything else, EDI?" Shepard asked.

"Not at this time," EDI replied. "Logging you out, Shepard." Her avatar vanished.

* * *

Freedom's Progress had little to recommend it to the casual visitor. It was an independent human colony out on the border of Alliance territory. Despite the fact that it was three weeks away from the nearest Mass Relay for any ship not capable of hyperspace translation, it was exactly the sort of place illicit smuggling of human technology to the Citadel races was likely to take place. Alliance patrols were irregular here at best, and that fact was not lost on Shepard or her crew. The colony had gone dark two days before the Normandy's launch. The Normandy was fast both in and out of hyperspace, and they would have been able to reach the G-type star's hyperlimit in three days if that's where they were going.

Shepard ordered the Normandy out of hyperspace five light-days and thirty light-minutes from the colony's G-type star. Even as the grav-drive cycled down from its hyperspace operational mode, Shepard frowned thoughtfully at her display. Hyperwave transmissions were significantly faster than light - faster than ships could move in hyperspace, even - so there'd be no catching those at this distance, but radio was possible. And they could observe the planet from this distance and watch what had happened as the light reached them.

"Bring up Freedom's progress on long range scanners," Shepard ordered. "Telescopes if you have to. I want to see what happened there."

It was only static at first. Then the science officer fixed the ship's passive sensors on the distant world, compensated for its orbital velocity, and brought up the brown and blue world on the primary display.

A Grey Ship hung over the planet like a bird of prey. Even as they watched, it engaged and destroyed the orbital defenses. A handful of ships rose up to meet it, but it swatted them out of the sky with almost contemptuous ease, firing with a purple beam weapon that just sheared through the local defense ships, cutting them into pieces like their armor wasn't even there. Another ship - an Asari style smuggler's vessel - lifted off from the planet, madly evading even as the Grey Ship fired upon it. It left the atmosphere. The Grey Ship bore down on it. It went to FTL.

Then the Grey Ship descended to the surface, and every human on the normandy with even the slightest bit of telepathic ability felt a chill that went to the bone, as if someone had just walked over their grave. All signals from the surface ceased.

Silence in the CIC.

"OK," Joker said, "What the shit was that?"

"We're going to find out," Shepard said. "Take us in, Joker. Nice and quiet. Lawson, Taylor, gather a team and meet me in the hanger. I want us headed for the surface as soon as we make orbit. And I want to know everything there is to know about that colony before we land."

Shepard headed down to suit up.

There was a little turbulence when the dropship hit atmo. It bounced and rattled a little, but that was all. Otherwise, it felt a lot like being on an elevator. Back at the academy, Shepard had once asked why that was. It had to do with the ship's artificial gravity easing off as the planet's natural gravity took over. Apparently, it was possible to completely negate all sensation of descent if you got the alignment of the emitters just so, but few people wanted to put in the extra work required to do so. So even on the brand new, top of the line 'Avenger' MK2 dropship, you were still aware of it.

As the dropship descended, Jane Shepard spared a look at the empty seats all around her. The Avenger was a multi-purpose craft, and though there were not yet civilian models, they would be coming along eventually. Besides bringing a nose-mounted rotary plasma cannon, two turret-mounted lasers, and a sophisticated electronic warfare suite to the table in any engagement, the Avenger was also fast, quiet, had hard points for missile pods, and was designed to transport as many as fourteen fully loaded combat troops. It was currently holding eight: Jane Shepard, Miranda Lawson, Jacob Taylor, and five XCOM marines, plus a heavy-plasma equipped hover-SHIV and pair of Seekers that EDI was operating remotely.

Taylor was suited up in his Mechanized Exoskeletal Cybersuit, and his helmet concealed his features. It was a savage-looking thing designed for urban combat, and equipped with a MEC-variant Firestorm on one arm, and what looked like an oversized, fully automatic alloy cannon in the other. Miranda had suited up in a biotic-amp suit - a suit of powered armor with biotic amplifiers far stronger than anything that could be mounted to the back of a person's neck. It took considerably longer to put on, but Miranda didn't complain. Shepard herself wore a new set of N7 powered armor, this one equipped with a full psionic amplifier suite. The rest wore modern variants of the old Titan suit.

"Shepard," EDI announced, her voice filtering through the speakers on the SHIV, "We are detecting Quarian lifesigns in colony, and the remains of a ship on the northwest landing pad."

"Acknowledged," Shepard said. Quarians. An Asari smuggler ship. The Grey Ships. Some kind of psionic attack. There was something else, too. Something on the tip of her tongue that she couldn't quite put into words. Something...

The Avenger set down at the south landing pad.

End Chapter 02

* * *

CODEX: Hyperspace Travel  
Initially limited to telepathic signals sent via hyperwave beacon, human scientists eventually discovered a way to physically transport a starship into the alternate dimension which was the medium for hyperwave technology. Existing alongside normal space, the differing physical laws of this non-Euclidian 'hyperspace' allows for effective faster-than-light travel compared to travel by conventional means. Although faster by an order of magnitude than any non-Relay form of FTL travel, it is subject to limitations which conventional mass-effect based FTL drives do not have: massive sources of natural gravity such as stars and black holes cast a kind of shadow into hyperspace which is highly disruptive to nonpsionic beings and to any objects passing through them. While hyperspace travel through such areas is theoretically possible - evidenced by the fact that, during the First Contact War, the Ethereal Temple Ship accomplished this very feat, this capability has yet to be duplicated by human technology.

During the Second Contact War, despite their ships otherwise being outclassed by human vessels, the Turian fleet leveraged its ability to engage in FTL travel inside a star's hyperlimit to merciless effect. The capture and reverse-engineering of Turian designs and the subsequent development of the hybrid gravity wave engine, which allowed human vessels to make use of Mass Effect derived FTL travel, is today considered to have been the turning point in the war.

Author's note: Next chapter is coming along, as is the next chapter of New World in my View. We'll see which one is finished first.


	3. The Grey Ship

Smoke on the Water  
by P.H. Wise  
A Mass Effect/XCOM Crossover Fanfic

Chapter 03: The Grey Ship

Disclaimer: I own neither Mass Effect (EA) nor XCOM (God only knows).

* * *

The snow crunched beneath their feet as Jane and her squad made their way through the colony of Freedom's Progress. It was cold, and it was night, and the lights of the colony washed out the stars. There were active civilian-model security SHIVs in the main colony complex - rugged all terrain models that were popular more for their ability to take a beating than anything else - but EDI was already on it, and expected to have them all shut down before either fireteam got close enough for it to be an issue. The two fireteams, Jane, Miranda, Jacob, and a tall XCOM marine by the name Leo Jones on one, the other four XCOM marines on the other, would alternate with one advancing and the other on overwatch, and the colony layout made that easy enough.

"Shepard," EDI said through Jane's commlink, "I have control of the local mechanized assets. I am rerouting their sensor data to your mapping software." Even as she spoke, the Augmented Reality image of the colony as a whole lit up with new information.

"Acknowledged," Jane replied. "Good work, EDI."

"Thank you, Shepard," EDI said. "Be advised that the Quarian life signs are fading. There are currently only three left alive. One will be dead in less than a minute."

Jane frowned. "Got it. Keep the Seekers on patrol, and inform me if you spot anything."

It was an eerie, empty place, and the only sounds aside from the snow and the wind were the sounds they themselves made moving through it. There were signs of weapons fire - plasma and laser burns, mostly - but not nearly as much as there should have been for a colony of 900,000 people to have been so utterly depopulated. The condition of the buildings varied: some places looked untouched, with dinner still waiting on the table, as if the occupants had just stepped out for a moment, but other rooms had overturned furniture and hasty barricades thrown together. The latter was where they found signs of weapons fire. No bodies, though. Not yet, anyways.

The other fireteam was on overwatch as Jane and her group moved forward when they got near where they'd detected Quarian lifesigns earlier. They had reached the entrance to the central colony complex - the main dome inside which could be found administration, security, public housing, and the commercial district - and it took a few moments for Sgt. Jones to get it open.

The door split in the center and opened with a grinding sound. Immediately, a Quarian body fell through it; whoever he was, he'd been propped up against the door, and he was dead. He'd taken a hit to the chest, and the nearest comparison that Jane could make was that it looked like someone had gone to town on the Quarian with a chainsaw. The damage was horrific and extensive. Tissue had ruptured, bones had shattered, and the whole ruined chest cavity was full of blood, which had pooled around his body. There was evidence of medigel in the wound, too - someone had tried to give him first aid. It hadn't worked. Whatever had hit him had torn right through his kinetic barriers, and it had happened recently - within the last thirty minutes. Beyond him, the secondary airlock door that allowed the main complex to be completely sealed had been blown open with explosives. Shepard took a moment to place a tiny locator beacon on the body for later retrieval.

Her fireteam and the other one traded off advances and overwatches for another quarter mile into the main dome before, with her team on the advance again, she found herself in front of the primary administrative building for the colony. It was a five story building, roughly square shaped, and with two main entrances: one in front, one on the side. A fountain stood in the public square in front of it, and when she caught sight of the statue at the fountain's heart, her breath caught.

The statue was a woman standing tall, clear eyed, gazing towards the horizon. Bob-cut hair framed a lovely face above a body in an old style Earth Coalition uniform whose features were perhaps more heroic on the statue than they had been in life. There were few humans who would not recognize that image, cast in bronze or not: The Volunteer. Her name had been Annette, but nobody referred to her by that, nor by her last name. It was always The Volunteer: the woman who had laid down her life to save the Earth from destruction in the final hours of the First Contact War. Looking at that statue, Jane Shepard felt a sudden sense of vertigo. She had to shut her eyes for a moment and take a deep breath before it began to recede.

Jane could feel Miranda's eyes on her as she stared at the statue, and she was glad of the helmet: she had no idea what her face looked like right now, but she was sure it would reveal too much. Too much of what, she did not know.

"Shepard," EDI said, and as quickly as that, the moment was over. "I have gained full control of the colony's security network. Please be advised that there are six unidentified life forms advancing on your position. I am sending the security feed to your display."

A camera feed popped into view on Jane's HUD, and what she saw made her blood boil: Sectoids. They were God damn sectoids. Weird sectoids that looked like they'd gone feral, with skin that had a greenish hue instead of their more normal grey, more distinctly webbed hands and feet, and tiny claws at the tips of each finger, but sectoids. They moved the same way as she remembered, half-scuttling, half running, and they carried strange pistols - not plasma, or at least not recognizably so - which had an odd, narrow, nearly dish shaped design with a central spoke that could only be the emitter for whatever it fired. Shepard held up a hand. The team didn't need any more than that: the telepathic link she'd already set up for the squad showed them all what she intended. Jane's fireteam fell back from the fountain and took up positions in cover even as the second fireteam - the one on overwatch - took aim and waited for her signal.

The Sectoids approached the administration building cautiously, but didn't spot Jane or her team. Three of them paused to the side of the door, glancing about furtively. The other three moved up to the door. One of them reached up and opened it.

With a silent signal, Jane's team lit them up from the side. She lashed at at one telepathically, blasting it instantly unconscious and hoping she hadn't just caused a fatal cerebral hemorrhage in the creature. The other five would have scattered instantly, but Miranda gestured, her body flaring with the electric blue of active biotics. A biotic singularity rippled into being between the five remaining Sectoids, scooping them all off their feet to orbit helplessly around it: combined fire from both fire teams killed them instantly. Their guns exploded upon the deaths of the users, sending a spray of weapon fragments across the ground.

"Sectoids," Miranda said disbelievingly. "No sign of any of the races involved in the First Contact War for almost two hundred years, and now they're here, and in ships that actively resist any effort to identify them?"

"What I want to know is, why were they left behind?" Jane asked.

Miranda thought about that. "Maybe their ship is still nearby, and will be returning to collect them once their mission, whatever it is, is complete?"

"Either way," Jacob said, "Them being here is either one hell of a coincidence, or…"

"Or the Ethereals are back to finish what they started," Jane said. She glanced over the data she was getting from the colony's security systems. There was another two groups of Sectoids in the colony. One was moving towards the main building's infirmary, while the other… "EDI," Shepard said, "Have the Seekers and the local security SHIVs take out the group heading for the power generator. We'll handle the other." She looked to her squad. "Let's move, people," she said.

Jane's team went in. The other fireteam remained outside to cover the building, while the SHIV maneuvered to where it had a clear line of fire to the building's side entrance.

The building wasn't complicated: it was just two central hallways that intersected halfway down with numerous rooms on either side. There were five floors: the ground floor was security, the second held primary administration and the infirmary, and above that were offices. Jane could see all six of the second sectoid group on the security feed, gathered outside the infirmary on the second floor. One tried to open it, but it had been locked. The aliens grew agitated. One of them produced what looked very similar to a First Contact War plasma grenade. It manipulated the device, applied it to the door, and stepped back: the grenade adhered to the door. It let out a low whine, and blew the door open with a low, thrumming thud of a green explosion.

A startled cry came from within. Someone opened fire with a shotgun. The sectoids scattered for what cover they could find. Then one of them heard Jacob's approach: even in a carpeted building, a MEC was hard to miss. Its eyes widened almost comically at the sight of Jane and her squad. Even more so when Jacob fired off a plasma grenade. Two of the sectoids dove through the door into the infirmary. A shotgun roared, and a sectoid let out a dying shriek: quite a feat without a mouth.

Three of the strange, green sectoids were caught in the blast of the plasma grenade, and were instantly killed. The one who hadn't panicked returned fire, its weapon making an odd high pitched squeal that you felt in your teeth more than you heard. Most of the blasts missed, but one scored a lucky hit Jacob' MEC right on the left arm's elbow joint, and carved a deep enough gouge into it to damage its internal servos, effectively disabling the arm. Jane felt confident she didn't want to take any hits from that gun.

Jane let herself connect with the creature's mind, privately marveling at how much easier this was now, after Lazarus. She whispered into its thoughts, murmuring aloud as she did so, "_**You are going to die here.**_"

The sectoid lost it. Its eyes bugged out, and it dropped its pistol and ran. A short burst from Sgt. Jones's plasma rifle put the creature down. Then another high-pitched, squealing weapon discharge came from inside the infirmary. Then another shotgun blast. Then silence.

Jane brought up the security feed for the infirmary, and then cursed loudly. "Friendlies coming in!" she called. "Don't shoot!"

There was a pained cough, and then a familiar voice replied, "Shepard? Is that you?"

Jane walked through the infirmary door. Two dead sectoids lay on either side of it. The infirmary had taken a lot of damage from the explosion earlier, and the beds closest to the door had partially melted. Two quarians were huddled behind a medical scanner on the far side of the room, well beyond the damaged area, one male, one female. Their suits were badly damaged, and both had taken gruesome hits: the male's upper arm and shoulder was a bloody mess, and the female had taken a gut shot from one of the sectoid pistols. It was bad.

It was also Tali'zorah nar Rayya. Her shotgun lay discarded next to her, the muzzle still smoking from its recent discharges.

Jane's eyes widened. "Tali!" she exclaimed, rushing to her friend's side even as she called up the Quarian profile Doctor Chakwas had developed for the medical nanites used in the Terran medical kit during the voyage of the previous Normandy.

"Aren't you supposed to be dead?" Tali asked distantly, her eyes glassy and unfocused, "I'm pretty sure you're dead."

"I was," Jane said as she unclipped the medical MELD dispenser from her belt and administered the treatment to Tali. She couldn't quite manage a grin. The situation was too grim for that. "I got better."

"Oh, right," Tali said, and passed out.

The little nanites she'd just applied could and did save lives, speed healing, help to close wounds, and fight infection: Especially if used in conjunction with medigel, which Tali's companion was already applying. And with both of their suits damaged, infection was almost a sure bet. But although they could stabilize the dying in many cases and bring those with minor wounds back to full fighting form in short order, nanites weren't magic. For injuries this severe, Tali still needed major surgery or she'd die faster than the medical MELD could fix her. Jane looked to the other quarian. "How bad?" she asked.

"Very bad," the male Quarian said. "Even if we were back in the Migrant Fleet right now, I'd only give her 50/50 odds of survival. Myself, maybe 75/25." He grimaced. "So you're Shepard, then? She talks about you." He offered a hand, and Jane shook it. "Kal'Reegar, Migrant Fleet Marines. I wish we were meeting under better circumstances."

"You're not the only one," Shepard replied. Then she tapped her earpiece. "Shepard to Normandy. We need a cleanup crew, and we're coming in with a medical emergency. Please inform Doctor Chakwas to prep for surgery on wounded Quarians."

"Acknowledged, Shepard," EDI said. On her HUD, the last enemy contact vanished. Then EDI reported, "All sectoid contacts have been neutralized. Several civilian security SHIVs were destroyed in the process."

Jane rose to her feet. "All right, people, we are moving out. Kal'Reegar, you're with us." She picked up a device from one of the shelves, positioned it directly above Tali's body, and pushed a button on the back. Immediately, Tali's body floated into the air, her back, arms, and legs held perfectly straight, as if she were on a stretcher. The grav-stretcher's systems linked up with Shepard's armor, and she set it to 'follow' mode. "Team 2 will remain on site with our mechanized assets to provide security for the cleanup crew."

"Commander," Miranda began, "I realize you allowed aliens aboard your previous ship, but…" She trailed off in the face of Jane's murderous glare.

"Tali is my friend, and a vital ally," Jane said, speaking in a voice of deadly calm. "She proved herself a dozen times over against Saren and the Geth. You make whatever arrangements you need to to accommodate having a pair of quarians on board, but I am not going to leave her to die on this Godforsaken rock. Is that clear?"

Miranda let out a weary sigh. "I'll make the necessary security arrangements," she said, and immediately opened her omni-tool and went to work.

* * *

Jane Shepard sank into her chair in the Normandy's CIC. The ship might have been XCOM, but the design of the CIC was alliance standard: the captain's chair was in the middle of the room, with the various crew stations all around it, positioned for ease of communication in the midst of battle. She studied the information being projected on her terminal intently: if the Grey Ship had left those Sectoids on the surface, then it was probably still in the system. The fact that they hadn't detected it on the way in meant that either it was equipped with an IES - internal emission sink - stealth system like the Normandy's, or it was hiding in the shadow of one of the other celestial bodies in the system. In this star system, that made for an extremely limited range of options: the Liberty system had only two planets. The first was Freedom's Progress. The second was a gas giant without a specific name, mostly just called Liberty Two. It had a dozen small moons in various orbits, and unless the Grey Ship was on the far side of the star, it was probably hiding amongst the moons of the gas giant.

Lieutenant Susan Yamada - this shift's primary sensors operator - had been working on the problem for the last twenty minutes. Her uniform was spotless, her shoes shone, and she had dark pixie-cut hair, an oval shaped face and warm brown eyes; her demeanor was never less than professional.

Lt. Yamada had narrowed down the possible vectors the alien ship could be on, and the Normandy had just begun to deploy a series of sensor probes. Three were on trajectories that would take them to the far side of the star. Six more were moving to cover the gas giant and its system of moons. It was a sure bet the Grey Ship knew they were here. The only question was what the ship would do when they found it.

As much as Jane Shepard would rather have been in the medical bay where Doctor Chakwas was trying to save Tali's life, she knew that the best thing she could do for Tali was stay out of Doctor Chakwas' way. Her hovering would not make the Doctor's job any easier. And more to the point, they had a potential hostile contact to find.

An hour later, Tali was still in surgery, and the probes had reached the gas giant and settled into their pre-planned orbits. New telemetry filled the display on Jane's console.

Nothing.

No sign of the Grey Ship. Which didn't make sense. Stealth was basically impossible in space. Even the Normandy - a ship specifically designed for that impossible task - could only hide her heat emissions for 6 hours at most, and she only got that much because her drive was gravity based, and therefore had no huge heat-producing plume of thrust.

"Maybe we're missing something," Jane mused.

Miranda looked thoughtful, but didn't say anything. She'd come in about twenty minutes prior, having posted guards outside all the sensitive areas of the ship to prevent curious Quarians from wandering through.

Jane brought up the sensor feed from Freedom's Progress. Colony in the northern hemisphere. Most of the southern hemisphere dominated by an ocean rich with various forms of algae that served as the planet's primary supplier of oxygen. The water had a distinctly greenish tinge even from orbit.

"Do you think they may be landed on the planet? Hid their ship, somehow?" Miranda asked.

Jane shook her head. "Any ship big enough to take nine hundred thousand colonists would be pretty damn obvious to an orbital scan."

Lt. Yamada looked to Shepard and Miranda, "Unless," she began, "Unless they landed in the ocean. They might be able to hide their heat signature that way."

Miranda blinked. "A submersible spaceship? I suppose it's possible. We do it at Cydonia with shuttles and Avengers, after all."

"If they're down there, they're probably just waiting for us to leave, Ma'am," Lt. Yamada said. "As soon as we're too far away to get back in time to intercept them at full military thrust, they head for orbit on the opposite side of the planet and then it's clear sailing all the way to the hyperlimit." She thought about the problem. "If these are sectoid ships, they'll be made of the same alloys as ours, won't they? If I reconfigure the planetary survey scanner for Terran Alloys…" she looked to Jane. "It may take a few hours of scanning, but we should be able to find them."

Jane nodded. "How long to reconfigure the scanner?" she asked.

"Twenty, maybe thirty minutes," Lt. Yamada said.

"Do it."

It took closer to thirty minutes than twenty to make the necessary modifications. Then the Normandy began its search pattern. In the two and a half hours that it took to complete the orbital scans, Jane received word from sickbay that Tali was out of surgery, but she was still unconscious. She stopped in to the medical bay to see her.

Jane had known that Tali's suit had been damaged beyond repair, but knowing that and seeing her lying there on a bed in a sterile, hermetically sealed room were kilometers apart. Her skin was a shade that hugged the border between purple and pink, her hair a rich, dark purple, and the visible texture of it was much coarser than human hair, though that might just have been the result of living her life every day in her environment-suit. Her face was surprisingly human-like, though less so than an Asari's despite the presence of hair. She had three of what Jane could only call swept-back bone crests? It was hard to describe. Hard to find the right word for. They weren't horns, at least. The tips of her ears were pointed, as were her earlobes. She wore no makeup, but that wasn't surprising, and she would have been incredibly cute if she didn't look so frail, brittle, and washed out from having suffered severe injury and just having gone through major surgery.

Kal'Reegar's suit was in no better condition than Tali's: it had been ripped open from the upper left shoulder down all the way to the right hip. He was still wearing it, though, and the mask still covered his face. Doctor Chakwas had him in yet another sealed off, sterile room. His exposed skin was an ever so slightly darker shade than Tali's; his left arm hung in a sling, and his shoulder was covered in bandages. His chest and stomach were hairless, and _damn. _Jane wasn't particularly into men of any species, but you could grate _cheese _on those abs. She couldn't help but wonder what the rest of him looked like. He was awake, and he nodded to Jane when he saw her, showing no indication whatever that he'd noticed her checking him out. Jane nodded back. Then she turned to Doctor Chakwas. "How is she?" she asked.

Doctor Chakwas' lips thinned slightly. "If she survives the night, then I think she's in the clear," she said. "All we can do now is wait and hope the MELD does its work."

Jane looked away. There were a dozen things she wanted to say. She wanted to thank Karen Chakwas for the work she did. She wanted to ask Kal'Reegar what the hell they'd been doing down there in the first place. She wanted to ask about the damage Tali had suffered from the strange sectoid gun. But she was tired, and seeing Tali like that hurt her. She wanted to tell Karin to take care of her friend. But what she said was, "... I should go."

Chakwas seemed to understand anyways. She nodded. "I'll let you know if anything changes," she said.

"Thank you, Doctor."

By the time Shepard returned to the CIC, the scans were completed. No sign of Terran Alloy anywhere on the planet except for the colony proper.

Lt. Yamada scowled at her instruments as though they had personally offended her. "Sorry, Skipper," she said. "Nothing. No Terran alloys outside the complex, and no traces of Elerium, either. Maybe they're on the other side of the star after all."

"Maybe," Jane said.

Lt. Yamada frowned at her console.

"Lieutenant?"

"Probably nothing, ma'am. I didn't actually disable the detection algorithms for traditional materials when I was scanning, and there's a small gold deposit that's…" she trailed off, her fingers flying across her console. "That's in the ocean." She further isolated the signal, focusing every scanner the ship had on that point. "... and is the source of a very small gravitic anomaly - small enough that we never would have noticed it if we weren't looking right at it…" she grinned, then. "I think I just found them, Commander."

Jane took the Lieutenant at her word. She looked to the tactical station, currently manned by a Lieutenant Ramirez - a clean cut, dark skinned young man. "Guns," Jane said, "Draw up a firing solution."

Ramirez looked up. "Ma'am, plasma's no good under that much water, and I don't know if our lasers will do much better." His protest didn't stop him, though: he went to work.

"I wasn't planning to broadside them, Lieutenant," Jane said.

Ramirez got it. "Right." He finished the necessary calculations.

Jane nodded. "Fire."

The SR2 Normandy was one of the most advanced warships ever fielded by humans. No one had ever put a graser on a destroyer before, but the Normandy had two spinal mounted grasers serving, along with two pairs of plasma cannons, as her chase armament: one set of weapons facing fore, the other facing aft. They had a monstrous power requirement, and they could only be fired three times each (or six from one, given that you could technically power either one of them from either bank of capacitors) before their capacitors were depleted and needed to recharge - a process which took three hours - but for those six shots, the Normandy class destroyers were able to punch far above their weight class. The ship had already maneuvered to position itself for an ideal firing of the weapon. When Jane gave the order, Lt. Ramirez executed it. There was a tenth of a second delay. Then the gamma ray laser was discharged like a lance of nuclear light. It hit the water and vaporized it on contact. It lost energy as it went down, flash-vaporizing a hole about a meter in diameter through an eighth of a kilometer of water and into the hull of the Grey Ship that hid beneath the waves. An underwater laser was extremely inefficient, and a stupendous amount of energy was lost just getting to the target.

There was still enough power to burn through the Grey Ship's armored hull and score its innards with damaging amounts of heat and radiation. A tremendous plume of steam billowed up into the air, obscuring the target from view, followed immediately by a churning in the water.

"The target is moving, Ma'am," Yamada reported. "Their systems are powering up, and it's rising rapidly."

The second shot seared off part of the Grey Ship's superstructure just as it broke the surface of the water. They still couldn't see the damn thing, but their sensors were able to tell them where it was, and that was enough.

The third shot caught the Grey Ship amidships flying over land just as it had completed a series of complex evasive maneuvers that meant very little against a light-speed weapon fired from orbit. It never had a chance to raise its shields. It never had a chance to fire back.

The Grey Ship went down, and it went down hard: it hit the side of a cliff that overlooked a long, muddy beach with a thunderous crash, deflected off it, hit the ground below, flipped several times, pieces of its structure breaking off as it went, and carved a muddy debris-filled trench 1.6 kilometers long before it came to a rest in the water, halfway submerged, with greenish waves lapping at the wreck.

A cheer went up from the CIC crew, and Jane clapped Lt. Ramirez on the shoulder. "Nice shot," she said.

Then something flickered, and the details of the Grey Ship's remains snapped into place as its systems failed. Not that they could tell much of what it had originally looked like from the wreck. What was left of it was a central section about 300 meters across, and it was obvious that the ship wasn't large enough to have taken 900,000 colonists. An escort, then, or perhaps a cruiser left behind to monitor the situation. It was a start, at least.

"Now comes the hard part," Jane said.

Now it was time to secure the crashed UFO.

* * *

Underwater engagements were problematic. Visibility was limited, and sensors that worked just fine on land or in space were of limited use; water absorbs electromagnetic radiation a lot more strongly than air. Plasma weapons didn't work; the magnetic sheath that contained the shots would just collapse when it hit the water two times out of three, leaving you with a pocket of superheated ionized gas flash-vaporizing the water directly in front of your face. Powered armor meant that was survivable, but it didn't make the plasma gun any less useless. Lasers were also problematic. Water absorbs light, and it absorbs ultraviolet, yellow, red, and infrared frequencies most strongly. Most of the hand-held lasers used by the Alliance did their work in infrared and red, and XCOM weapons, by and large, were Alliance weapons: the technology and combat doctrine of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit had been foundational to the Alliance, and even though XCOM still existed as a separate entity, its equipment was, by and large, the same. Powered armor also had its problems: although it go into the water without issue, you could forget about swimming: it was too heavy to do anything but walk along the bottom.

But the Alliance military was a great believer in adaptability. All of its weapon systems were highly modular, and could be adapted to fit the situation at hand. That did not mean they had all the parts to do so readily available. In the world of military procurement, Murphy's Law was holy scripture.

The latest Archangel powered armors which eschewed thrusters entirely for a fully anti-grav flight system would have been amazingly useful for any entry to the submerged alien craft. The Normandy had two. There were five SHIVs on the ship, but only enough SHIV-lasers to equip two of them. Donnelly, Daniels, and a team of engineers were scratch-building more from replacement parts for the first two, but they didn't expect to have more than one ready before it was go-time. Sectopods couldn't go into the water at all, though their weaponry still worked just fine in an aquatic environment - though it did have a vastly reduced range. Seekers no longer used gas to become invisible, so that was fine as well, but there was no telling how well they would be able to hide in an aquatic environment when fluid dynamics came into play.

Jacob Taylor, in charge of the second squad, was perhaps understandably irked. 'At least we've got the mods to swap over our lasers over into blue and green,' he thought sourly; a laser with a maximum effective range of 20 meters was less than ideal, but it was better than nothing.

The problem was that there just wasn't that much demand for underwater capabilities in a space-faring society. The next time the Normandy made port in Alliance territory, he was damn well going to make sure they had everything they needed to operate in said environment. In the meantime, he'd do the best he could with what he had.

At least the Blaster Launchers still worked.

Twenty minutes later, after all the necessary preparations for their mission had been made, and all the laser rifles and pistols were all switched over to blue or green - the process took about a minute per weapon - both of the Normandy's Avenger class dropships, each carrying eight soldiers and an anti-grav laser-wielding SHIV and four Seekers, set down about a klick away from the beach and out of sight.

The Seekers activated their tactical cloaks and fanned out to perform recon of the site. The only sign of their passage was the faint splash they made when they entered the water, moving invisibly through it every bit as gracefully as the squid they resembled. Jacob's MEC was being repaired, but he had a backup, and the backup was what he wore now, towering over the human sized soldiers in squad: his was a mixed team, four MECs, four psychics. He watched on his tactical display as the Seekers performed their primary reconnaissance function, filling in details, showing hidden Sectoids in the water.

One of the Avengers took off, then, taking Shepard and her team to their underwater insertion point on his right flank.

Then they began the first part of the plan: even as Shepard approached underwater from the west, Jacob signalled the three telepaths he'd brought with him. They began to concentrate, their eyes shining with the purple and ultraviolet light that signalled active psionics. A few moments later, a pair of sectoids who had been positioned to ambush Shepard's team turned on their fellows: one turned his strange rifle on the sniper who waited next to him and blew the other creature's brain out. The other threw a grenade into a group of three sectoids who lay in wait behind a broken piece of debris. There was a high pitched, bone-rattling shriek like nothing Jacob had ever heard, even filtered through the water. Then the spray-dome of the explosion fountained into the air, and the water roiled for several seconds in its wake. Shepard took the next one, and yet another sectoid turned on his allies, turning and firing a full automatic burst from its rifle into the vulnerable bodies of its fellows, reducing two others to little more than clouds of murky seawater mixed with blood and viscera.

In the space of a few seconds, the sectoids on guard outside the ship were in full retreat. That was when the Seekers struck, decloaking as they each seized an sectoid from behind, snapping their fragile necks with grasping metal tentacles.

The retreat instantly became a rout, with a full dozen sectoids fleeing madly back to the nominal safety of their ship. Exposed and out of cover, they were cut down by a hail of close range blue and green laser fire from Shepard's team.

Two minutes later, Shepard's telepathic voice rang in their minds: "Begin phase two."

Damn but that woman knew her business. When he'd first heard Shepard was being given command, Jacob had been… concerned. She was a known alien sympathizer. And worse. He tried not to judge. He had tried to be philosophical about it. He tried to dismiss it with, 'Who she loves is none of my business.' But it had made him angry and disgusted to see the images of Shepard and that Asari together, holding hands after the battle of the Citadel. The incredible similarity of Asari to humanity in general just made it worse: there was this uncanny valley effect that made his skin crawl when he watched them for any length of time. But now, seeing her in action, he figured Central had made the right call putting Shepard in charge, alien girlfriend or not.

It was still creepy.

Banishing the extraneous, non-mission related thoughts from his mind, Jacob glanced at his fellow troopers. "Hope you're ready to get wet," he told them.

* * *

'So far, so good,' Jane thought. The water was full of silt and sediment after that last explosion, and that was going to degrade the range of their lasers even more, but there was no helping it. Jacob's squad of eight was moving into position to surround the ship: her own would be making entry. They didn't bother with an airlock. Those were almost certainly traps: it's what she would do, after all, and there was no reason to assume that the sectoids would be any less vicious. So Jane and the other seven soldiers with her made entry through the hole the graser had cut in the ship.

Even as Jane's teams made entry, the the mind-controlled sectoids walked through the doors on the opposite side of the vessel, each carrying a primed alien grenade. Weapons discharged the moment the airlock (water lock?) cycled open. Only one of the sectoids actually made it inside, and Jane had the brief impression of four of them staring at it in horror before she released its mind.

The high pitched, bone-rattling, teeth-jarring shriek of the new alien grenade went off, and the subsequent explosion rocked the ship.

Jane's two fireteams found themselves in the ruins of a whole mess of alien artifacts of unknown design in a long chamber which narrowed as it neared the heart of the wreck, where a green wall cut off their view of the rest of the ship. About halfway between their entry point and the door was an open circular hatch in the floor. The remains of what might have been grey spheres mounted on pedestals were beneath their feet. The walls were mostly green, the floors mostly a subdued gold. The lights in this section flickered fitfully, giving the place a dreamlike feel further enhanced by the fact that it was underwater, and moving through it was strange.

A pair of Seekers slipped through the hatch and into the chamber below - a long corridor that led to the entry airlocks at the base of the wreck, below its main superstructure. It was designed to be defensible. To funnel attackers through a series of vicious ambush points. A lone, panicked sectoid guarded the one the Seekers approached. Something set it off. Its eyes narrowed, and it swung the enormous, oversized rifle it was carrying around and fired on full auto, filling the air with bolts of energy accompanied by sonic shrieks.

One of the Seekers took a hit despite its invisibility, and the blast simply ripped it apart.

The other Seeker took the sectoid from behind and broke its neck.

With the way cleared, the two fireteams went down through the hatch and into the lower level of the ship. This floor was roughly x-shaped, with a central chamber walled in on all but one side. Between the two spokes of the x opposite their entry point, another spoke jutted out from the central area.

There was an sectoid waiting for them in the central chamber, and it opened fire as it caught sight of the humans. It missed, and the misses were near miraculous: given the awkward way they were moving in the underwater environment, with the exception of Sgt. Jones and Jane herself in their anti-grav equipped archangel armor, they had very little mobility - to the point that they were practically sitting ducks. Corporal Robert Jenkins - the telekinetic assigned to her squad - put the creature down with a blast of blue laser light at point blank range.

Then Jane felt a sense of something skittering across her thoughts.

Damn. Enemy psychics. "Brace for telepathic intrusion," she told the squad.

Jenkins apparently didn't hear her, or wasn't listening. He let out a laugh as he walked forward into the central chamber - a lift of some sort that allowed access to the second floor. "Damn but these aliens suck. Is it always this easy to take an alien ship?"

Before Jane could say so much as a word in reprimand, what looked like a feral hanar on acid with a vicious octopus-style beak swooped down from the floor above. The shape was similar, but it lacked the gelatinous flesh of the hanar, having instead ropy tentacles and smooth, muscular flesh. It wrapped its tentacles around the soldier, drew him in, and used that beak to bite clear through his armor. It took less than a second.

Jenkins freaked, "GET IT OFF ME!" he shrieked, "THE DAMN THING BIT ME! KILL IT!"

Concentrated laser fire brought it down.

"Shit!" Jenkins hissed, trying to bend to examine his injury. "Shit, this really hurts."

"What have we learned, Jenkins?" Jane asked dryly.

"Yeah, yeah, never be a jackass when a professional soldier is called for." He frowned. "Shit, I don't feel so good, Commander."

A new telepathic presence. A psychic attack slammed into Jane's defenses, and she staggered. Anyone else would have crumbled in the face of it. Hell, before Lazarus, SHE would have crumbled in the face of it. She was stronger, now. The rest of the squad was in varying states of psionic-induced panic; one dropped his weapon, three of them ran. Sgt. Jones had presence of mind enough simply to take cover, but a sixth soldier, in the grips of panic, discharged his weapon repeatedly into Sgt. Jones' back. He went down.

Even as Jane strove against the psionic attack, peeling it back from her squad, Jenkins howled in agony, his body jerking violently as he clutched at the bite. He was incoherent, now. Just screaming.

Then two alien grenades dropped down the shaft from above.

Shepard telekinetically batted them back up the way they came. They detonated somewhere above her. The lapse in concentration cost her, and she lost her grip on the enemy minds. "Damn it," she hissed. The rest of the squad was non-functional. Another of those beaked not-hanar came gliding smoothly down through the hatch.

The Seeker caught a mere second before it would have latched onto Jane. They struggled against each other, two tentacled beings, one biological, the other synthetic, and found themselves evenly matched. The water churned violently.

Jenkins decked her with a metal-clad fist backed with all the enhanced strength of his powered armor. Shepard would have fallen if not for her archangel armor: the anti-grav unit caught her halfway to the ground, and she spun upwards, shot back from Jenkins, and lashed out at the mind attacking her squad. 'Minds,' she realized as she came into psychic contact. At least a dozen sectoids had combined their abilities to launch this attack, and they were using Jenkins as a goddamn psychic relay!

Then she sensed the nascent monster growing inside Jenkins, and a thrill of horror shot through her. No. Not Jenkins. The egg that the creature had laid inside his gut after it had bit through his armor, now hatched and growing as quickly as it could feed..

Jenkins came at her again, this time swinging his blaster launcher like a baseball club. She caught it. The impact was jarring, and a little surreal, but she caught it. Then she slipped into his thoughts. She had half a second to sense the sheer agony he was in, being puppeted by the creature that was devouring him from the inside before she sent him into unconsciousness with the telepathic equivalent of a cudgel to the back of the head. Then she shot back from the central chamber, leveled the blaster launcher, and fired.

The guided projectile emerged from the end of the weapon and, guided by her thoughts, it shot forward, moved smoothly _around_ Jenkins, the Seeker, and the alien horror, completely altered its momentum and flew up to the second level of the ship before detonating.

The detonation of the micronuke simply erased everything within ten meters.

Jane came back to her senses thirty seconds later. Her armor was damaged, but body was a lot worse off. The water was dark and murky. The lights of the ship were off in this section. Jenkins was dead, and so was the half-grown monster within him - killed by the blast wave, not the fusion reaction. The Seeker and the creature it had been fighting were both destroyed. Her ears were ringing and her everything hurt, and her HUD informed her that medigel was being applied, and that her secondary heart had kicked in to keep her alive even as her meld began the slow process of repairing the damage.

The psionic attack had been broken. Without their relay, the sectoids above couldn't target her squad; if they were lucky, the feedback might have killed them. Sgt. Jones was alive, his secondary heart having kicked in as well. Jane and her squad were on their feet and ready to move out within a minute. When they reached the ship's command center ten minutes later, they found a dozen badly concussed aquatic sectoids who could barely stand. Nearing exhaustion herself, Shepard and her squad killed them all in a hail of laser fire.

There was more to clear. They weren't done yet. They went room to room, killing or rendering unconscious every alien they encountered. It was harder than it needed to be because of the underwater environment. Several of her squad took hits they wouldn't have on the surface. One had an arm blown clean off by a sectoid with one of those oversized rifles that looked utterly absurd in the diminutive creature's hands but was no less effective. Twice more they happened upon the vicious not-hanar, and twice more they put them down with extreme prejudice. By the end of it, the remaining sectoids were in panic, mostly just trying to flee.

By the time she got back to the Avenger, Jane wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week. That wasn't going to happen. Exhausted and injured, she set about organizing the cleanup and salvage operation.

The reward for work well done is more work.

END CHAPTER 03

Author's notes:  
Omake time! No, the following is not actually going to happen in my story:

[OMAKE]

(so very non-canon)

Shepard, Tali, and a dozen XCOM Marines hopped off the elevator of light and stepped out into the Catalyst chamber. It seemed open to space, but there was air to breathe. A smooth walkway led from their position to a pillar of light with a massive pylon to the right and left of it, the right pylon bathed in reddish light, the left in blue. None of them were entirely sure what to expect: the Crucible had been built in secret and at great expense, and it hadn't been easy to convince the Citadel Council that they needed to borrow the Citadel for a little bit. Or realistic. Or possible. None of that had ever stopped XCOM before, so there was no reason it should start now.

Even as they approached the place where the walkway split, with one path leading forward into the beam of light, one to the red pylon, and one to the blue, a little boy made of light appeared before them. Every single one of them leveled their weapons in response.

"Hello," the little boy said. "I am the Catalyst. It's been a very long time since anyone has come..."

"Oh, crap," Shepard said. "A pop-up. Tali? Get rid of this thing, would you?"

The Catalyst glared at her. "I am NOT a pop-up! I am the intelligence which controls the reapers! You will show some respect!"

"I'm on it, Shepard," Tali said, completely ignoring the light-child's words as she brought up her omnitool and typed out a series of commands.

"What are you doing?" the Catalyst asked suspiciously. "Stop it! STOP!" And then it derezzed with a squawk of protest.

"There we go," Tali said.

Shepard turned to the the others. "All right, people. Secure the room. And don't touch anything. Research and Development wants this place as intact as possible before they start taking it apart piece by piece to figure out how everything works."

"Taking it apart!?" the Catalyst asked.

Shepard glanced at Tali.

"No!" the Catalyst exclaimed. "This isn't how it goes! You're supposed to decide between control, destruction, and synthe...!"

Tali typed in a few additional commands and deactivated the voice interface. "Sorry, Shepard. I didn't realize the voice interface was on a separate circuit. Done."

Shepard nodded. "Nice work, Tali."

XCOM went to work.

* * *

"So," Doctor Vahlen asked. "What have you found?"

Miranda looked up from her examination of the weird blue control bars. "Ah, hello, Doctor. Aside from being the central CPU for the Reaper fleet, as near as we can tell, this," she gestured to the blue control bar, "Is designed to disintegrate a roughly human sized person who holds these bars. ... and lets them control the Reapers. We're not entirely clear on how those two things coincide. The red pylon releases an energy pulse that uses the Mass Relays to destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy, including the Reapers. We're pretty sure we can duplicate that one. The beam of light in the middle appears to... combine all synthetic and biological life together into a new synthesis, the primary effect of which appears to be to give people green glowy lines and glowing eyes. I suspect we can also duplicate that one, though I can't think of a reason why we would want to. "

Doctor Vahlen laughed. "Your sense of humor has taken an absurdist turn, I see. What have you really found?"

Miranda made a face. "I was being serious."

Doctor Vahlen blinked. She looked at Miranda. "You're not joking."

Miranda shook her head. "No."

Doctor Vahlen gestured to the chamber. "Die and control the Reapers, destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy including the Reapers, combine all synthetic and biological life in such a way as to mostly just make things glow green." It sounded just as stupid when she said it as it had when Miranda had said it.

Miranda nodded.

Doctor Vahlen pinched the bridge of her nose. "Right. Well, if this is indeed the central, controlling intelligence of the Reapers, the solution seems simple enough. Gather what samples you need to allow for the duplication of the reaper-killing effect. No doubt it will make an effective weapon for our capital ships. Once we are safely away, the fleet will begin its bombardment. It should only take us a few years to build a new Citadel - one that isn't the central CPU for a fleet of genocidal dreadnoughts."

Miranda nodded. Then she gathered her things and took a few last samples - not necessarily in that order - and then she, Doctor Vahlen, and all the other XCOM personnel departed.

"Fucking space-magic," Doctor Vahlen muttered as the light-elevator began to descend.

[/OMAKE]


	4. Interlude 01: First Shanxi

Smoke on the Water  
by P.H. Wise  
A Mass Effect/XCOM Crossover Fanfic

Interlude 01: First Shanxi

Disclaimer: I own neither Mass Effect (EA) nor XCOM (God only knows).

Author's note: This interlude touches on the First Contact War. Anyone who finds such things tiresome or is otherwise not interested in reading yet another author's take on said conflict should feel free to skip it. The only thing you're missing is gratuitous space battles.

* * *

General Desolace Arterius didn't quite scowl at the holographic display in front of him. The Hierarchy knew very little about the species they were about to engage in battle, and he had never been the sort of soldier who liked going into a fight blind. Or almost blind. Relay 314 had seen an exchange of fire between a Turian patrol and the unknown alien fleet that had reactivated the dormant relay. The patrol had been initially successful, but had been ambushed and destroyed by a numerically superior force not long afterwards. He now commanded the fleet which had tracked the aliens back to their homeworld, where they were under orders to demonstrate to the primitives the error in killing soldiers of the Hierarchy. The Turian fleet had been decelerating for quite a while now, and were coasting along at just above the speed of light as they moved through the alien system. Another 10 minutes, and the Turian fleet would be dropping out of FTL entirely and arriving in orbit of the alien world to engage their fleet. They were clearly new to interstellar space: they had no ships larger than a cruiser. Frigates seemed to be the order of the day, with the alien fleet boasting a fully thirty of them supporting a six cruisers and a large number of fighter craft, though ten of those thirty were notably smaller the others. Warbook was tentatively classifying both the slightly-too-large frigate-sized vessels and the smaller vessels as frigates. The Turian fleet, by contrast, fielded a dozen cruisers, three dreadnoughts, and thirty two frigates.

He wished they knew more.

The plan, such as it was, was fairly simple: despite the ease with which one ship could avoid another in space, assaulting their planet had a wonderful way of forcing a fleet to stand and fight where it would ordinarily scatter. Scouting reports said that the aliens had deployed nearly half their frigates in outer-system pickets. The scouts had also showed a number of probes scattered throughout the system in a sensor net that probably covered every approach to the planet. And it was damned strange. No trace of eezo in any of the probes. No trace of the traditional miniature mass relay setup that allowed for FTL communication among the citadel races. Given that they'd be arriving at FTL speeds, albeit only the 1.2c at which the FTL operational modes of their engines engaged, why bother with a sensor net that would only tell them that an enemy had arrived long after they had already attacked your planet? The picket made more sense, but unless those ships had their FTL drives ready to engage on a moment's notice, they probably wouldn't arrive in time to help once they arrived in orbit.

'Don't complain when your enemy makes a strategic error,' Desolace reminded himself.

Eight minutes out. It bothered Desolace, knowing that enemy ships were out there and that he had no way of seeing how they responded to him because of speed of light limitations, but he pushed the worry out of his mind.

Five minutes out. Three. The pre-battle tension seemed to grow. "I want firing solutions on the alien ships as soon as we drop out of FTL," he ordered. It was unnecessary for him to say so. The crew knew their business. Briefings had already been held. Orders had already been given. One minute.

The sensation of emerging from FTL filled the room, a strange sinking feeling as the ship's mass increased. It was supposed to be almost imperceptible, but 'almost' was a far cry from 'completely.' The three dreadnoughts had made the transition in the space of a second, doing all of their deceleration while their mass was still negligible, dropping to conventional speeds 200,000 kilometers away from the planet. They'd arrived in perfect formation, each with four frigates screening it, the capital ships positioned to have ideal firing arcs on the orbital defenses that would avoid the chance of striking the planet itself. Less than half a second for light to cross the distance between the Turian fleet and the alien ships. Another half-second for VI-assisted fire control programs to acquire targets. Fighters began to launch.

The alien fleet was already in formation when they arrived. Already accelerating towards them at 50 gravities. That was going to cut into the time they'd allotted for long range bombardment of the immobile orbital defenses.

The Turian ships began to fire, his own among them. His ships had appeared with broadsides facing the enemy, allowing all sixty of its secondary mass accelerators to open fire. It was a risk to present one's broadside to the enemy, but he had felt that the greater volume of fire would be crucial in the opening stages of the engagement, and they should have more than enough time to bring their bows about before the alien fleet reached Extreme Range, even at the rate it was closing.

Several salvos of mass accelerator shot were fired at the defense satellites, all in rapid succession, and one large salvo of missiles a hundred anti-ship missiles was fired concurrently with the first salvo of mass accelerators. The alien ships were too agile for any hits at this range. It took nearly thirty seconds for the initial salvo to reach its target, but given that the target of each shot was an orbital defense station, thirty seconds was plenty of time. The kill rate wasn't what Desolace would have preferred: the aliens were filling space with ECM, and their defense satellites began maneuvering as soon as incoming fire was detected. Ten salvos were fired from each ship in the space of a minute, sending a total of 1,800 five kilogram slugs at 1.3% of C into the enemy orbital defenses. Only the one missile volley was fired, but it should have been more than enough. Despite this volume of fire, only 7 of the 50 defense satellites on the fleet-ward side of the planet were destroyed in the initial salvo. One shot would do the job if it connected, but connecting was proving harder than they'd anticipated when they'd planned this attack. The second salvo destroyed only three: the enemy was adapting to the speed of their projectiles. The third salvo took only one. The next seven managed another four. 15 of the 50 defense satellites had been destroyed by the time he could no longer afford to devote fire to the task. The enemy fleet was closing, and he needed to bring his ships about to face them bow-on, as proper Turian tactics dictated.

Desolace looked thoughtful as he considered the enemy ships on his holo-display. Their rate of acceleration was respectable. Turian ships could match - or do better if they wished - it if they dropped their mass low enough, but the constant acceleration would take its toll sooner or later, whether it was in terms of reaction mass or of heat; antiprotons were expensive. Alien ships weren't moving directly towards his dreadnoughts, though. It was damned odd: they were moving in at an angle that would put them in effective weapons range for all of one minute and thirty seconds, assuming they didn't change course. This wasn't accepted naval doctrine. Were they intending to loop around behind his fleet? But why would they...? "Are we picking up any eezo signatures from the enemy ships?" he asked.

His sensor operator had the answer a moment later, and her surprise was evident in her tone: "No, sir. Not a trace of eezo in any of their ships."

That brought even more confusion. Without eezo, how were they maintaining fifty gravities of acceleration without killing everyone on their ship? Had they developed some other way to deal with their own inertia?

"All dreadnoughts, bring the forward guns to bear on the enemy fleet and prepare to commence bombardment."

The three Turian dreadnoughts turned with far more grace than they had any right to, the combination of mass effect fields and directional thrust moving them effortlessly into position. The rest of the fleet adjusted accordingly, frigate wolf-packs in position, cruisers preparing for the enemy fleet to enter their own effective range.

"Enemy ships at forty thousand kilometers." the sensors operator reported.

One minute and thirty seconds until their speed and trajectory took them out of weapons range. Best make it count. "Dreadnought group, fire."

The ship shuddered faintly as its spinal mounted mass drivers spoke into the night. Bright streaks of gunfire flashed away from the three, and then a second salvo, a third, a fourth. The enemy ships returned fire, each of the six cruisers firing a single glowing orange torpedo; each of the larger alien frigates fired a salvo of four missiles, and then another four, and another four before there was a pause. He surmised that there were four missile tubes per overly-large frigate, each able to fire three missiles before reloading was required. Both the alien missiles and the alien torpedo weapons were faster than his own fleet's mass drivers. Their maneuverability defied belief: the missiles came in accelerating at over 600 gravities, and the strange torpedoes could and did completely alter their momentum almost at will. How the hell that was accomplished without the eezo, Desolace had no idea.

Two of the torpedoes got through the GARDIAN laser fire in the first salvo, and that only because of the sheer concentrated volume of fire put out by the fleet's deployment. One detonated in the midst of a frigate wolf-pack. The second struck the kinetic barriers of a cruiser. A ball of light flared into existence around the frigates, which then contracted to a single point as fleet sensors detected massive gravitational anomalies and a build up of energies that defied description. Less than a second later, the gravitic anomalies ceased, and the fusion reaction created within them had nowhere to go but out; not just the four frigates, but the two neighboring wolf-packs. Not just the cruiser, but the one in formation with it. Everything the light touched was consumed, flash-converted to plasma, added to the expanding blast wave. Desolace stared at the holographic sensor screen in a state of shock: that wasn't any nuclear weapon he'd ever heard of; their enemy had just attacked them with some kind of... miniature supernova torpedo? The very thought was absurd, and yet there it was, its energies fading, twelve frigates and two cruisers destroyed by two torpedoes.

The missiles were easier to shoot down only because their extreme acceleration made their maneuvers clumsy. GARDIAN lasers reached 90% capacity, and then 100, and three of the missiles got through: they did not detonate as they should have. Instead, sensors reported intense gravitational anomalies coming from all three missiles, each aligned with a Turian cruiser supporting his central dreadnought. Sensors registered fusion reactions directly behind the gravitic anomalies. Then each emitted a monstrously powerful x-ray laser blast into its respective cruiser. Their armor ablated as it was intended to, boiling away into a vaporized material that should scatter the beam. Only their armor had never been intended to face a beam of this magnitude: they burned through the cloud and kept right on going into the innards of the ship, scouring away every living thing they touched, melting decks, setting off secondary explosions, and decompressing internal compartments - and that was before the induced shockwave came into effect in the clouds of vaporized material and caused secondary plasma explosions. Of the three ships targeted, one was sheared completely in half, one had taken a hit directly to its Eezo core and was now dead in space. The third was lucky: they'd only been glanced, lost most of their starboard broadside, and had multiple compartments opened to space.

By this point, the fact that the enemy had attacked with fusion pumped laser missiles barely raised his incredulity.

Then the second volley of supernova torpedoes struck, each shot aimed at a single ship; the dreadnought ten kilometers distant from his own shook violently as one of those damnable torpedos detonated across its bow, scouring off the forward weapons of the vessel; it was saved from the fate of the cruisers only by virtue of its far stronger kinetic barriers and better armor, but the damage it had taken was still considerable. Two more Turian cruisers were converted to an expanding blast-wave which tore another several frigates to pieces as they passed.

His dreadnoughts' long range fire had a far less impressive showing: four of enemy oversized frigates destroyed, two more crippled along with a cruiser that was leaking some kind of glowing green material. Their barriers were far more powerful than they had any right to be.

One minute and thirty seconds, and then the enemy fleet was out of range again. The Turian fighters had never gotten close enough to act. As the enemy fleet turned on its axis and began a rapid deceleration to reverse their course and take them into his fleet from behind, Desolace found that he did not wish to see what the alien ships might do to his fleet at closer range.

"Sir, multiple contacts inbound from the planet! Warbook is classifying them as fighters. Acceleration rate is 100 gravities." There was a disbelieving note in the voice of his sensors operator. That was absurdly fast; assuming this was their maximum acceleration, the alien fighters had half again the acceleration rate of their Turian equivalents.

Desolace nodded. Fighter squadrons on one side, the fleet on the other? His mandibles twitched. Something was very, very wrong here. His instincts were screaming at him that something very, very bad was about to happen, and they had never led him wrong before. "Get us out," he instructed. "When that pincer closes, I don't want us anywhere near it." He opened a fleet-wide transmission. "All ships, prepare for FTL." Courses were plotted for every ship in the fleet. Each ship slid smoothly into formation.

The enemy fleet opened fire, spitting out a cloud of strange, fast moving green projectiles. Desolace had been about to ask what they were when explosions began to ripple across the hull of his ship - the dreadnought at the center of the Turian formation - as lasers invisible to the naked eye burned deep gouges into its armor and set off secondary plasma explosions as induced shockwaves ripped through the individual ablation clouds of vaporized material.

"General, we're taking damage on all decks! The enemy fleet is emitting extremely concentrated bursts of x-ray..."

"Ship to ship lasers! They're using ship to ship laser weapons!"

Then their mass dropped precipitously and faster than light acceleration was engaged, taking the Turian fleet out of the pincer before the green projectiles could strike home. An equally rapid deceleration, burning reaction mass they couldn't really spare dropped them out of FTL and back at conventional speeds less than second later, having positioned themselves above the pincer and out of the alien fleet's standard engagement range.

"Damage report," Desolace ordered.

It didn't look good. The alien fleet had concentrated its fire on his ship, and they'd nearly crippled it in the space of a few seconds. The main gun was still functional, but none of the turrets and none of the GARDIAN systems on the side of the hull that had been facing the alien fleet were still functional, and they had hull breaches on every deck. Nothing that couldn't be contained, but even so, it had been eye-opening.

"We have a firing solution," the weapons officer announced.

"Fire," Desolace commanded.

Once again, the main guns of the dreadnoughts spoke, this time targeting the theoretical spot at which the alien ships' acceleration would fully negate their 'backwards' momentum. "Why don't they go to FTL?" he wondered aloud. "They have to detect the incoming fire."

The alien ships didn't go FTL, and if Desolace hadn't known for a fact that ships from this planet had reached Shanxi, he would have assumed they were incapable of it. What they did instead was fire off four more of those damnable fusion torpedos in staggered intervals to shield their fleet from the incoming fire. A barrage that should have destroyed the majority of the alien fleet only destroyed one of the undersized frigates and crippled two of the over-large ones.

Damn. "Pull us back," Desolace ordered. This wasn't going to be the quick victory he'd thought. Better to play it safe. Pull back and wait for overwhelming numbers. If the aliens' FTL capabilities were limited somehow or otherwise difficult to use, then the Turians would have the advantage in a war of attrition, and that is surely what would be required to take this planet of disturbingly advanced, eezo-less aliens.

The Turian fleet accelerated to faster than light and blazed its way back to the mass relay.

So ended the First Battle of Shanxi.


	5. Complications

All Sectoids were telepaths to some extent. This new Aquatic Sectoid was no exception. Miranda, on the other hand, was not telepathic. Or at least, she wasn't very much: like Sectoids, all humans possessed the Gift to at least a very small degree, and had for a very long time. It was why the Ethereals had come to Earth in the first place. Before the Ethereal invasion, the psi-effect in humans had been present, but so weakly present that the effect was indistinguishable from background noise. It had been effectively useless. Men and women could train their whole lives in the use of the Gift and never be able to do more than a few cheap, worthless parlor tricks that were far easier and more profitable to fake. All that had changed with the Ethereals and their experiments, which in turn had driven XCOM and EXALT's efforts to investigate psionic abilities. Humanity had Awakened.. Today, the percentage of the population who had the Gift strongly enough for it to be useful to them was approximately 40%, and growing steadily; it was expected to approach 100% some time in the next two or three hundred years.

Miranda had almost no talent for telepathy; if you plugged her into the strongest psi-amp available to human science, she could get vague impressions of people's surface thoughts, but that was the best she could do. Her telekinesis was a little better; with a proper psi-amp, she could manipulate objects weighing up to a few ounces at distances of up to a meter, but that was all. Suffice to say, her talents lay in other areas.

But a person did not need to be a telepath in order to make use of a mind probe. The technology had come a long way since the First Contact War. Once upon a time, mind probes has been a literal description, consisting of a series of invasive cranial probes which gave you access to the subject's cerebral cortex. Interpretation of the data thereby gathered was a delicate and painstaking process, often leading to the death of the subject. Today's mind probes were much cleaner: they were smooth spherical devices which allowed the user direct access to the subject's field of consciousness. Properly slaved to a suitably programmed alliance commlink (they were specifically made to be incompatible with Citadel omnitools as a security feature), the mind probe was an invaluable tool for interrogation and intelligence gathering. It was mechanical telepathy, though because it operated without a sentient mind's direct access to what researchers (and no one else) called 'conchspace,' the inverse-square law still applied, which limited the range to about three meters for a portable unit.

The Sectoid was strapped to a table in the Normandy's high security Alien Containment unit up on deck 1, located under the exterior pressure hull, and designed to be able to vent every prisoner contained therein into space at a moment's notice should it be necessary to do so. Miranda wore a full NBC-suit for the whole affair; one never knew what sort of infectious properties an alien might have, and if there was anything the XCOM science department had learned, it was that it was better safe than zombie.

"Can you understand me?" Miranda asked.

The aquatic sectoid stared at her, making no response whatever. She tried again in other languages, using an Alliance commlink to automatically translate what she was saying. Nothing on any of the more common Earth languages. No reaction to the major Citadel languages. Then she tried a few of the more obscure ones, and her eyebrows shot upward when it visibly reacted to Hanar, which consisted entirely of sophisticated patterns of bioluminescence. Information shot across Miranda's comm-display when the language centers of the Sectoid's brain went active. She spoke several sentences which were duly translated via holofield. Then she asked, "Who are you?"

The sectoid's voice was entirely telepathic. It wasn't words in any language so much as thought/concepts, sensory impressions and a sense of inexplicable connection between ideas. It had no lips, no voice box to produce sound, and yet it spoke; its first words were of longing, of division between brothers, friends swept away by a terrible foe who sought to uplift them into the same darkness which had consumed the Fallen Ones. It studied Miranda for a few seconds, and then its eyes widened. "You bear the touch of the Fallen Ones," it 'said.'

"Who are the Fallen Ones?"

The creature hissed angrily, and she had the distinct impression that if it could have spat, it would have. "Fallen. Outcast. Those who failed to Ascend. Who proved unworthy of the gods. The fingerprints of the Fallen upon you. Their blasphemous technology in your hands. Their touch upon your minds."

"And that is why you are attacking human colonies?"

"Attack. Study. Dissect. Experiment. Determine."

"What are you trying to determine?"

Silence, even in its thoughts. It didn't know.

The interrogation lasted for an hour. Many, many questions were asked, and though few answers were helpful, the alien couldn't lie to the mind-probe: not without a hell of a lot more psionic strength than it had. Afterwards, Miranda forwarded the information retrieved to both Shepard and to Vahlen. Then she left the containment area, performed standard decontamination procedures, changed back into her standard uniform, and made her way to the conference room. .

Jane Shepard and Jacob Taylor were there waiting for her. As she came into the conference room, Miranda said, "Well, that was unpleasant." She looked to Shepard. "You've reviewed my report?" she asked.

Jane nodded. "Only just finished. Didn't the Ethereals claim that they had failed to Ascend?" Jane asked.

"Yes," Miranda said. "It's in the log of XCOM's final mission of the First Contact War."

"So it may not be the Ethereals after all," Jane mused. "It sounds to me like there's some sort of religious conflict going on between the Ethereals and these… Aquatic Sectoids. Aquatoids?"

"We can name them later," Miranda said.

"The enemy of my enemy," Jacob said. "I hear that's supposed to be your friend."

Jane smirked. "Sometimes. But most times, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more, no less." The smirk faded. "I'm more than a little worried by the fact that the Aquatoid was able to understand the Hanar language."

"Are we really going to call it that?" Miranda asked.

Jane waggled her eyebrows, and Miranda sighed.

"Its knowledge of the hanar language is certainly suggestive," Miranda said. "Do we have a plan for the prisoner?"

"Central wants it," Jane replied. "They're sending the Iwo Jima to meet us at the Mass Relay."

"That was quick," Jacob said. "I didn't realize we had another Normandy class destroyer finished."

"It was finished shortly after the Normandy," Miranda said. "It launched today." A pause. "If I may ask, Commander, why the Mass Relay?"

"Because it's three weeks using Citadel FTL to get there from here," Jane replied.

Miranda thought about it. "Ah. The Asari smuggler ship."

"Got it in one." Jane said.

Jacob looked amused, though he didn't actually laugh. "Any bets on the look on the captain's face when she comes out of FTL and finds us already waiting for her?" he asked.

"I'm gonna go with 'surprise,'" Jane said.

* * *

Smoke on the Water  
by P.H. Wise  
A Mass Effect/XCOM crossover fanfic

Chapter 04: Complications

Disclaimer: I own neither Mass Effect (EA) nor XCOM (God only knows) nor Terror from the Deep.

* * *

That evening, Jane let the door to her cabin slide shut behind her as she entered, and let out a breath. It was modest in size - not much bigger than her quarters on the original Normandy, and its design was a testament to efficient use of space. It was divided into two main rooms: her living quarters and her office. Both were small. Living quarters area held her bed - which could be hidden behind a sliding wall if she so chose, though that made the place feel downright claustrophobic - her dresser, a very small bathroom, and a tiny shower that could maybe hold two people if they were _very_ friendly. There was a very small couch built into the wall on the side of the room opposite her bed, and a pair of chairs in front of a coffee table in the middle of the room that made it inconvenient to walk around in the small space, as there was no part of the room that they were not in the way of getting to from any other part. Her office was equally small, having exactly the requisite amount of space and no more for her desk, a chair, her data terminal, and a few personal items.

A picture of Liara stood on the desk. She immediately recognized it: she'd taken it the day before the Grey Ship had attacked the original Normandy. The day before everything had gone wrong. Jane had just gotten off shift, and Liara was waiting for her in her quarters. She'd known that before she'd gone in: her lover or not, part of her team or not, Liara wasn't an Alliance crewmember, and she wasn't allowed in the more sensitive areas of the ship. And she didn't go anywhere without an escort, even if that escort had been on friendly terms with Liara towards the end.

The guard was standing outside the door, and he'd saluted as she approached. She'd released him back to his normal post. She'd taken the photo with her commlink, Liara sitting at the desk, reading the old, beat up copy of Dark Day, by Edward Prima. It was an old book, written a little after 2040, now considered a classic. One of those books you keep on your shelf because you think you should, but which few people ever actually read.

Liara had looked up and smiled afterwards, but the way she looked there, in that photo, so focused, so immersed in the book had made her look so damn cute...

Jane sank down into the chair. Responding to her thoughts, the data terminal went active.

There was a message waiting. A lot of messages waiting, actually. Several dozen from various news organizations that wanted to interview her. A few junk messages her spam filters hadn't caught for one reason or another. A message from Admiral Hackett giving official notice of her secondment to XCOM.

A message from Hannah Shepard.

She almost didn't open it. She almost deleted it without even reading it. It wasn't that she didn't want to talk to her mother, it was just… so much had happened. Where did she even start? A sense of helplessness washed over her, then, and the feeling offended her so much that she immediately opened the message out of sheer, stubborn contrariness.

From: Mom

So I have to find out my daughter is alive third-hand from a news report? Where the hell have you been? Why didn't you send word? Are you okay? Please, Jane, contact me as soon as you can.

Love,  
Your mother, Captain Hannah

Mom. There were few words in the English language more complicated than what was contained in that one syllable. Few relationships that meant more. Few people who could hurt you the way a mother could.

Hannah hadn't reacted well when Jane had first told her about Liara, and it had been bad. Things got strained, and that had hurt. It had hurt a lot. It wasn't the lesbian thing; nobody thought homosexuality was a big deal anymore, and even in traditionally conservative bastions like the Arabian Bloc and the Egyptian Cartel, it hadn't been an issue for over a hundred years. If Jane had told her her mother about a human woman she'd been seeing, Hannah would have just been happy for her. But relationships with aliens were still a heavy lift - especially for people of her mom's generation. Her mom had started to come around near the end. Things had been getting better. Hannah had apologized for the way she'd reacted, and they had even both arranged their next vacations to coincide so they could meet up on Mars for Christmas, and Hannah and Liara could meet.

Jane centered herself, letting the remembered hurt fade away. Her mom deserved better than to hear about her being alive from the news.

She replied to the message.

From: Jane

Hi, Mom. I know I should have sent this message earlier. A lot's happened, and I don't know how much I can tell you, but I'm alive, and I'm okay. Send Grandma and Grandpa my love.

Love,  
Jane

Grandma and Grandpa Shepard. She hadn't thought about them since her return. They were back on Mars these days as far as Jane knew. Claire Durand and John Shepard. Good people, if a little stuck in their ways. She hadn't told them about Liara. Her mother might have understood, but her grandparents had been part of the second generation born after the First Contact War, and they tended to be less… flexible. The fact that her grandmother was the Goddamn Volunteer's great-niece didn't help there.

She settled in to do some paperwork. It was all digital, yes, but it was still paperwork, and there was a lot of it to do as the captain of a starship. It was hours later, around 0200, and she was just starting to think of going to bed when the comm chimed. She answered. "Yes?"

"Commander," Doctor Chakwas said through the comm, "I thought you should know. Tali is awake."

A little knot of worry in her heart unclenched, and Jane smiled. "I'll be right there," she said.

She walked into the medical bay a few minutes later.

Inside the hermetically sealed, sterilized recovery room, Tali was awake, and still a little groggy, and she had a truly spectacular case of bed hair. She looked up when Jane knocked on the glass, and it took a second for her eyes to focus. She still looked bad. Feverish and brittle. But better than she'd looked this afternoon. "Shepard?" she asked, and then coughed. It sounded bad.

"Hey Tali," Jane said. "How are you feeling?"

Tali eyed Jane dubiously, becoming more awake by the moment. "I was shot, my suit suffered catastrophic failure, I nearly died of sepsis, I'm still running a fever, I have a nasty cough, my sinuses are filled with something I can't even describe, and the only reason I'm even alive is because your nanotechnology is temporarily acting as an artificial immune system, and you want to know how I'm feeling?"

Jane thought about apologizing. She didn't, but she thought about it. Instead, she doubled down, her tone gaining a dry edge to it. "Yeah," she said. "How are you feeling?".

"Never better," Tali said.

Jane nodded, just barely able to stop herself from grinning. "It's good to see you, Tali. Better to have you alive."

Tali smiled. It was wide, and a little bit goofy, and completely genuine, and it seemed to light up her whole face, and at the sight of it, Jane's struggle not to grin abruptly failed. "It's good to see you, too, Shepard," Tali said.

"Can you tell me what happened?" Jane asked. "Down on the planet?"

Tali's smile faded, and the room itself seemed less bright. "I'm sure you've heard that the Migrant Fleet has been in talks with Edgars Industries to develop a genemod to give my people fully functional - or better than fully functional - immune systems," she began.

"Edgars," Jane said thoughtfully. "I've heard of them. Based on Mars, right?"

Tali nodded. "Yes. And the truth is, we've come a lot further than just talks. We settled on contract a little while after the Quarian embassy was established on Terra Nova. The product has moved beyond its initial studies and animal testing, and is now at the point at which the only way to move forward is to actually give it to Quarian volunteers. A Quarian on Pilgrimage named Veetor was supposed to make contact with representatives of Edgars on Freedom's Progress and take them to the Migrant Fleet. We were going to start a double-blind study with two hundred Quarian subjects. But as the time of the meeting approached, the Admiralty grew concerned about Veetor's reliability. He's always been… unstable. Sensitive. And they determined that a failure here would be a disaster for the Fleet."

"So they sent you," Jane said.

Tali nodded. "Me and Kal'Reegar and a full squad of Migrant Fleet Marines. The invisible ships came the day of the meeting."

Jane blinked. "Invisible ships?" she asked, putting a slight emphasis on the first word.

"I know it sounds crazy," Tali said. "But whatever attacked the colony, we couldn't see it. I know there was more than one of them. They took out the garrison fleet, and then there was a sound." She looked troubled, "It didn't sound like Sovereign's horn, but that's the only thing I can compare it to. It had the same… sense to it." Tali shook her head. "I don't know if that makes any sense. But after the sound, a little more than half the humans in the colony just collapsed. Then the aliens started landing. It was..." She shuddered. "It was very bad, Shepard."

"How did you survive?"

"We hid," Tali admitted. "There was nothing we could do otherwise. We hid in a bombardment shelter. I think they knew we were inside: when we came out a few days after the last sign of activity, the green-gray creatures were waiting for us. We fought our way to security, and then to the Infirmary. You know the rest." She took a breath. "I don't know whether to be relieved or infuriated by what happened to the Edgars representatives."

Jane raised an eyebrow. "What happened to them?"

"We found out after the raid. I managed to break into the colony's security system. They and the test batch were captured by an Asari commando team half an hour before the invisible ships arrived. They did a very thorough, very careful job of erasing the security record, but not good enough. We suspect Eclipse, but we can't prove it."

The Asari freighter. Damn it. Of course anyone who'd gotten wind of the arrangement between the Migrant Fleet and Edgars Industries would want that test batch. Working MELD samples were highly sought after in Citadel space, much less MELD designed to introduce human-made gene-mods into a dextro-amino acid species..

Jane activated her omni-tool to project the image of the primary Grey Ship that had attacked the colony. "Tali," she said, "When you look at this image, what do you see?"

Tali regarded the picture with a slightly confused look that was echoed in her thoughts. "Freedom's Progress, seen from high orbit?" A pause. "What am I supposed to see here, Shepard?"

Jane hesitated, but only for a second. Then she connected telepathically to Tali, and showed her.

Tali's eyes went wide.

* * *

"Well," Miranda said, "That seems to corroborate Kal'Reegar's story."

They were in the conference room, and the table that was its centerpiece gleamed in the light. Jane nodded. "So. Quarians can't see the Grey Ships. You'd think we would have discovered this earlier."

Miranda shrugged. "Tali'Zorah was never in a position to have seen the Grey Ships on the SR-1. For that matter, neither was Liara T'soni, so we have no idea whether Asari can see the Grey Ships. Tali'Zorah and T'soni were on the crew deck when engineering blew out. Both were evacuated to escape pods, and neither had a view of what was happening with the ship afterwards." She paused, shifting mental gears. "Of course we can't allow whoever the Asari commandos were working for to keep the Meld and the Edgars representatives. The only question is, do we intercept them en route to the Mass Relay, or do we shadow them to their destination so we can find out who hired them in the first place?"

"I promised Tali we'd recover the Meld samples," Shepard replied. "Intercept. If we're quick, we can take the ship and give EDI direct access to their logs before they can wipe them, and find their employers that way."

Miranda frowned. "Critical systems on ships tend to be hardwired for exactly that reason, Commander. You can't just 'hack in' from an extranet connection. In order to do what you're suggesting, we'd need to get someone direct access to their computers who could set up a wireless connection for EDI to piggyback into the system on. We'd need a combat engineer to pull that off, and a good one. We don't have th…" she trailed off in sudden realization. "Oh, Commander. You didn't."

Shepard couldn't quite keep the smile off her face. "Didn't what, Miranda?"

"I suppose you plan to bring Liara aboard as well?" Miranda asked.

Shepard's smile became a grin.

"Shepard," Miranda said with exaggerated patience, "The Extraterrestrial Combat Unit isn't the Alliance Foreign Legion. It is not where we put all the aliens who are helping us fight." Her voice gained a harder edge. "We are an organization intended to fight nonhuman threats to the human race."

"Tali is the best combat engineer I've ever seen," Jane said. "Liara is both a brilliant scientist and a capable fighter. I couldn't have stopped Saren without the two of them, and there is no one, human or alien, that I would rather have at my back. Hell, I even had a C-Sec officer helping me out from the inside for most of the mission to stop Saren with his supervisors none the wiser. A Turian named Garrus Vakarian. He's good people, and I'd have taken him aboard the old Normandy if I thought I could have gotten away with it. The point is, you recruited the hero of the Citadel, Miranda. If you didn't want me in charge of this mission, you shouldn't have put me in charge."

Miranda's expression grew progressively darker as Jane spoke, and by the end, though she didn't say it aloud, her thoughts were full of some of the most interesting curses that Jane had ever heard. "I see," Miranda said in a surprisingly calm voice. "Are there any other aliens you'd like to add to the _Extraterrestrial Combat Unit_, or is it just these two?"

"I was thinking about hiring a Krogan mercenary or two," Jane said with a wink.

Miranda tried not to grind her teeth. "I assume you have a plan beyond 'board them, shoot them, be quicker than them?" she asked.

"Oh, yes," Jane replied.

Step 1: find the Asari ship

Knowing that the Asari ship, having departed Freedom's Progress five days prior, was at least two weeks and change from the Relay gave Jane a certain freedom. Her intent was to lie in wait along the ship's trajectory with the Normandy's stealth drive already active when she came out of FTL, matching her velocity as much as possible. There was a whole zone of possible exit vectors, which was why they needed to deploy a pair of hyperwave equipped probes to give them at least two data points for the Asari ship's course. Unfortunately, while anyone with a properly encoded hyperwave relay could receive hyperwave transmissions, only a telepath could actually send them. Which meant that for FTL communication, outside the range of a Mass Relay and its associated comm buoys, you needed an actual physical human being in place to do the job. For ships like the Normandy, that meant using communication pods.

Nobody liked them. They were an incredibly inelegant solution, and they were basically hell for the poor specialists left in them for days at a time. Each was essentially a lifeboat designed to hold a single person, a passive sensor suite, a hyperwave relay, a toilet, and enough food and water to ensure the specialist's survival for the duration. The pod's computer system was designed to automatically bring the operator out of whatever VR sim he or she was using to pass the time the moment it detected anything the VI decided merited the operators attention. Other than that, it was just the operator and the starlit emptiness. Tradition was that anyone who went into such a pod had free drinks at the ship's Captain's expense next shore leave.

The Normandy deployed four such pods along the two most likely flight paths to the Relay: one was the course for optimal fuel-efficiency, the other was the course for fastest transit time.

They had time to meet up with the Iwo Jima at the relay, and transferred the Aquatoid prisoner, the Aquatoid and 'evil ichneumon squid' cadavers, and most of the recovered artifacts. Shepard also, at Jacob Taylor's request, requisitioned another pair of Archangel powered armor suits from the Iwo Jima's stores, with plans to get at least a full squad's worth once they returned to Alliance territory, given that they were the only powered armor platform that allowed a person to maneuver reasonably well under water.

Jane also had time to arrange for Tali's and Kal'Reegar's suits to be repaired, allowing them to leave the medlab, though as per standard procedure, neither was allowed into sensitive areas of the ship. While no starship had the kind of energy output or space to spare to mount a full fledged nanoforge, the use of assembler nanites to repair damaged materials was easy enough, though the vulnerable microscopic robots couldn't operate without risk of damage outside of a Faraday cage; although MELD itself held up reasonably well on account of its E/M resistant partially biological structure, the purely mechanical nanites necessary for dedicated construction roles, by their very nature as microscopic robots, could not include much in the way of E/M shielding. Most people considered that a plus, as it cut down the likelihood of Grey Goo scenarios.

They got a ping from one of the comm-pods a few days later, and another a few days after that. Two data points formed the line they needed: the Asari ship was taking the fastest time route. Everything went like clockwork from there into step 2: match the freighter's course and velocity when it comes out of FTL. Joker had the Normandy in position, on course, her stealth drive engaged, and at the correct velocity when the Asari freighter emerged from FTL.

Technically, calling the Asari freighter a smuggler ship wasn't perfectly accurate, but it was of a model so notoriously commonly used for smuggling in Citadel films and popular culture that it had become associated with the activity even in the minds of non-Citadel races. When the Asari freighter neared the Mass Relay, it was still firing its forward thrusters to decelerate. It had clearly been running hot, and its relatively high velocity - still at nearly .2c when it showed up on the Normandy's sensors. It'd reach a safe velocity for Relay transit by the time it actually reached the relay, but only just. It was a relatively small ship, about 100 meters from stem to stern, and like many Asari ship designs, it had a certain yonic aesthetic. It wasn't blatant, but you could see it if you looked for it, particularly if you viewed the freighter from above.

Once, a few years after the end of the human/turian war, a drunk human corporate representative at a party on the Citadel had flat out asked an Asari Matriarch why Asari ships were shaped like vaginas. The Matriarch took exception to that, and replied with a few choice cutting words regarding the male human obsession with phallic-shaped ships and weapons. Naturally, the soon-to-be out of work human corporate rep responded by growing angry and belligerent. Well, more angry and more belligerent. Things degenerated from there. To this day, the party in question remains the only official Citadel soiree since the beginning of the Krogan Rebellion to have ended in a full scale drunken brawl.

Jane wasn't entirely sure why she'd thought of that just now, but it made her miss Liara.

A lot of things made her miss Liara.

Joker began accelerating the ship to compensate for the unexpectedly high post-FTL velocity of the Asari freighter.

"All right," Shepard said. "What do we have?"

"The transponder says she's the MV Atesan," Lieutenant Yamada reported. "The Freedom's Progress logs indicate that she took on a load of trade goods there - mostly textiles, spices, a few tons of chocolate." She paused. "The list is quite extensive, but none of it is questionable."

"Sounds about right," Jane said. Something about that ship's silhouette bothered her. She couldn't quite put her finger on what it was, but her instincts told her something was amiss. Before she could pursue the thought, Miranda walked into the CIC, and Jane nodded to her as she arrived. "Miranda," Jane said.

"Commander," Miranda said. "I think we're ready."

Right. Time to actually carry out this plan.

* * *

Tali'Zorah vas Neema was feeling better. Weeks of MELD treatment had restored her to full health, but she hadn't really felt like herself until she had her suit back, and repaired.

"It feels heavier," she'd noted at the time. "It's only barely noticeable."

Shepard had nodded. "I arranged for a few upgrades. A thin layer of Vahlloy enhanced with a carbon nano…"

"Vahlloy?" Tali had asked before Shepard could get any further into the explanation.

Shepard had smiled. "Sorry. Old joke. The technical name is 'Cydonium,' even if hardly anyone calls it that."

Terran Alloys. Shepard had upgraded her suit with Terran Alloys. Among the Migrant Fleet, Terran Alloys were one of the most highly prized building materials, incredibly rare, and incredibly expensive, and Shepard had just upgraded her suit's armor with it out of hand. And that was good, because Shepard was about to take her with a team of XCOM marines to raid an Asari freighter full of commandos. Now, standing in the cargo bay with six XCOM marines in suits of powered armor that made them all a full foot taller, as Shepard briefed them on the operation, Tali felt a surge of nostalgia. All they needed now would be for the Geth to make an appearance, and it would be just like old times.

"... and these are our hostages," Shepard said, the hologram between them showing images of two humans: a male and a female, both in business suits, both wearing very serious expressions. His skin was dark. Hers was pale. "We are going to rescue Doctor Johnson and Doctor Ivanova." Names appeared beneath each in turn, labelling the man as Edward Johnson and the woman as Sofie Ivanova. "We are going to bring them back alive and unharmed. We are going to recover the stolen property, and ideally, we are going to do it without anyone on that freighter knowing we were there."

The marines didn't visibly react. They just waited for Shepard to continue.

"I want to underline this fact," Shepard said. "We do not expect to see combat. If everything goes according to plan, not one of you will fire your weapons." She made a gesture, and holographic image of the freighter replaced the image of the hostages. "In order to gain access to the freighter without being seen, we are going to fly one of our Avenger dropships to a point just above the freighter's thruster envelope. It would be more dangerous of they were accelerating, but it's still not entirely safe." Her eyes went to Tali. "This is the first point where you come in, Tali."

Tali swallowed.

"Tali'Zorah nar Rayya is our mission specialist. Tali, we're going to need you to deploy your drone to cut open an external panel. You will then splice into said panel with this." She produced a bag from below the armory station.

Tali walked forward to retrieve the bag, opened it, and blinked. "This must be," She checked. "Shepard, this is ten meters of fiber cable. What am I supposed to..." Then she got it. "Oh, Keelah," she said.

"Once Tali'Zorah splices into the ship's network, she and EDI will disable the cargo airlock depressurization sensors and loop the security cameras before actually getting us in. From there, we have three main objectives:" The image of the freighter zoomed in to display internal schematics, showing the layout of a standard freighter of the Atesan's make and model, highlighting the crew areas, the cargo hold, and the location of the mainframe. "Recover the cargo, rescue the hostages, and gain direct access to the ship's mainframe, at which point EDI will recover the ship's logs and erase all evidence that we were ever aboard. Any questions?"

* * *

The Avenger dropship engaged its visual cloak as it flew out of the Normandy's hanger and into interstellar space, and the dropship pilot expertly maneuvered it to approach the Atesan from just above her thruster envelope: a well known but potentially deadly blind spot in the sensor suite of most Citadel-race starships. It was a delicate operation, finding the correct ratio of safety vs stealth. As long as the Atesan maintained her current course and speed, all would be well; if she flared her fusion torch drive and the Avenger pilot had judged the distances incorrectly, the dropship would be destroyed in short order.

With the ship in position, the rear hatch opened, and Tali'Zorah vas Neema floated out in the distinctive white of Archangel armor.

It felt just as weird as the last time she'd worn Terran armor during the fight against Saren, with all its absurdly responsive controls and enhanced physical abilities, but this time it had the added weirdness of the grav-unit . The gravity control unit allowed her to define whatever direction she wanted as down, could nullify the effect of gravity on her completely, and could be scaled up from zero-g to five times Thessia-standard, with an inertial dampener system to keep the user reasonably comfortable at that acceleration. The controls took some getting used to, but the automatic safeties helped, and once you mastered the controls, it allowed for an unparalleled mobility in a personal armor platform; the only way to improve it would be to add an eezo core to allow it to also take advantage of the mass effect. The five-fingered hand would have been impossible to control without the neural interface: she didn't have to move the fingers individually, she just had to try to move her hand, and the suit adjusted. The armor pinched a little bit around the hips, but that was probably because she had her suit on under it.

Oh, and the weirdest thing about this mission? She was working with an AI. EDI had been an extremely unpleasant shock. She'd heard that humans used AI, but she'd never thought they'd be so foolish as to make one the integrated computer system in charge of a warship! ...Then again, you couldn't really expect humans to learn from the mistakes other species had made. For all that Tali liked Shepard, and Ashley, and Kaiden, a lot of humans had this annoying superiority complex going that made them hard to deal with. And she was pretty sure that sooner or later, EDI was going to go crazy, kill everyone, and take over the ship. That was just how these things went.

Floating in the void, suspended on nothing, Tali deployed her drone and went to work. It was slow, difficult work, and she was just glad that the panel she had chosen wasn't anywhere near a window.

Ten minutes in, Tali paused in her work, considering the oddly shaped, barely visible hatch about a half meter to the left of the access panel Chiktika was busily cutting into. That shape bothered her: Particularly the way it blended into the hull such that you could only really make it out when you were right up next to it. She glanced to the right, and though it was equally hard to make out, sure enough, another barely visible hatch could be seen. A thought occurred to her, then: A deeply worrying thought. "Shepard," she said, "Do those look like gun ports to you?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. After about a second, Tali's HUD updated with new information about the freighter's engine: it was a military-grade antiproton drive. Then Jane's voice came on the line: "Rescue team, update on mission parameters: we have reason to suspect the freighter you are about to board is a q-ship. Be prepared for armed resistance."

A few minutes longer saw the completion of Chiktika's task. Then Tali deactivated the drone, flew over to the panel, detached the panel cover and examined the innards. The setup was more complicated than she'd hoped, and there were security features not found in standard wiring: she had to precisely calibrate a mass effect field around the fiber cable end she was splicing into the ship's wiring in order to avoid causing a disruption of the ship computer's technical faster than light (actually decreasing the mass of the space inside the fiber wiring to make the speed of light faster within it) processing speed. After a few minutes of nerve-wracking work requiring an excruciating level of focus, Tali successfully spliced into the ship's network, and then connected the fiber cable to the commlink she'd been provided. "I'm in," she said.

"As am I," EDI reported. "Attempting to gain access to ship systems. Limited access granted. Disengaging decompression sensors in the cargo bay."

Tali tried to follow the AI's activity, but she was only able to catch a very small part of it.

Connecting to local network…

… Access ID Spoofed.

… Encryption Keys generated.

… ICbreaker protocols engaged.

… Generating subnodes...

… Subnodes generated.

… Access granted.

Then a wall of data seemed to drown out any sort of intelligible content as EDI accessed everything she could reach through the splice. Tali quickly gave up trying, and instead set up a quick video loop on the security cameras in the cargo bay.

"Stage 1 complete," Tali reported.

"Stage 2 complete," EDI said a moment later. If computers could frown, EDI would have. "The cargo bay computer system is not networked with the rest of the ship. I am unable to access ship systems beyond the cargo bay. There is an unarmored Asari in the cargo bay." Another pause. "I have access to the local environmental controls."

"Is the cargo bay on a separate air system from the rest of the ship?" Shepard asked.

"It is," EDI replied.

"Can you disable her before we enter?" Shepard asked.

"I believe I can," EDI said.

"Do it."

Another pause. "Target disabled," EDI said. "No further presence detected within the cargo bay."

"I have the door whenever you're ready, Shepard," Tali said, feeling both gratified and a little disturbed by just how good of a team she and the AI were.

"Open the outer airlock," Shepard said. "We're coming in."

Once inside, Tali noted the fallen Asari in the middle of the cargo bay. She wasn't moving. "Shepard asked you to disable her, not kill her," Tali said.

"Most forms of organic life find death to be extremely disabling," EDI replied.

Tali's eyes narrowed.

"That was a joke," EDI said.

"So she's alive?" Tali asked.

"She is alive," EDI confirmed.

"She's also not dying?" Tali asked suspiciously.

"You have a very suspicious mind," EDI said.

"That's not a 'no,'" Tali said.

EDI's digital avatar on Tali's HUD actually rolled her eyes. "She is not dying, Tali."

* * *

The cargo bay was the largest room in the freighter, and it was both full of cargo and almost spotlessly clean. White and off-white shipping containers were neatly stacked and obsessively organized: everything in its place, and everything clearly labelled. One was labelled textiles, another Terran spices, several containers devoted to varieties of Terran booze - most of it wine and whisky. The lion's share was devoted to chocolate, though there was also one incongruous crate labelled as containing canned peaches, sodas, and a half dozen cheese graters. Opening it revealed only the items declared thereupon. Not that Shepard and her team had much time to open crates: when they boarded the Atesan, they were quick to secure the cargo bay as they prepared to move out to accomplish their various objectives. Once more, the squad divided into two four-man teams. Team two would hold position here to cover their exit. Team one would move through the ship and accomplish the objectives.

Team one was Jane, Tali, Sgt. Jones, and a heavy weapons specialist by the name of Kenneth Turnbow. Private Turnbow was a very large, athletic black man, his head shaved bald, with sharp brown eyes and an honest face, though none of that could be seen at the moment: each member of Team One was wearing Archangel armor with full helmets.

They activated their stealth modules and vanished from the visible spectrum of light. Guided by the ultraviolet and infrared spectrums plus the sensor suites of a dozen cloaked microdrones sent out to find their targets, Team One moved out into the ship. Even with their grav-packs, it was awkward: the Atesan wasn't made with Alliance powered armor in mind, and in some places they came perilously close to bumping into a passing guard or other member of the Atesan's crew. It quickly became obvious that this was no merchant crew: there were too many Asari commandos, and the crew went about their tasks with a distinctly military discipline that civilian crews just didn't have. Add to that the military-grade hardsuits and the strange rifles they were carrying, and it all but screamed Q-Ship. They spent five minutes making their way to the crew quarters. Then Jane spoke across their team's telepathic link: "Chances are, we're only going to get one shot at this, and when we free the prisoners, we're going to set off every alarm on the ship. Tali, you and Sgt. Jones head to the main computer terminal. I want EDI in that system ASAP. Turnbow, you're with me."

Entering the crew section was tricky. The doors were guarded by a pair of Asari, and Jane and Turnbow had to wait for someone to come out before they were able to slip inside. About a minute later, they got final confirmation on their targets from the microdrone sensor feed: one of them had made it into the ventilation system and even now had a visual of Doctor Johnson being interrogated by an Eclipse-uniformed Salarian with a small silver orb that Jane recognized immediately: an Alliance mind probe.

"Shepard," Tali said, her mental voice echoing too loudly in the telepathic link: a sign of telepathic inexperience. "We're in. I just need a few minutes to establish the uplink to EDI. And I know I've said this before, but these visual cloaks are amazing."

"Acknowledged," Jane replied. "We'll try not to stir up the hornets nest more than we have to." She exchanged glances with Turnbow, and Turnbow nodded. They wouldn't be able to remain cloaked for much longer, but hopefully it would be long enough to do what they needed to do.

A full two agonizing minutes passed, every second using up power they couldn't spare before the door to the interrogation room opened, and an Asari in Eclipse commando leathers came walking out, a datapad clutched protectively in her hands. Jane and Turnbow slipped in before the door could close behind her, their grav-packs ensuring that no sound of footfalls gave them away.

Doctor Johnson was lying on his side, staring wildly at the Salarian interrogator. An Asari and another Salarian stood guard. Johnson was restrained, handcuffed behind his back, the handcuffs attached to an exposed pipe where a section of flooring had been removed. "I won't tell you anything," he whispered. "Won't tell… won't…"

"Don't fight it, human," the Salarian said. "Attempting to resist the probe will only damage you. We'll still get what we need. Don't make the same mistake your colleague made." He gestured to where Doctor Ivanova lay insensate against the wall, her eyes wide and staring at nothing. Both doctors looked like they had seen better days, but Ivanova looked worse.

"Go to hell," Doctor Johnson managed. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark circles under them. He stank, and so did Doctor Ivanova.

"That's what the female said, human," the Salarian said. "Do you think it will,do you any more good than it did her? I do not wish to see you damaged, but this is your choice, not mine."

Jane focused, slipping into the thoughts of the Asari and Salarian guard, shoving aside their native wills and taking direct control of their nervous systems. Each raised their strange rifles and pointed them at the interrogator. "Disconnect, put the mind probe down, and step away from Doctor Johnson," they both said in perfect unison.

The interrogator froze.

Then the cloaking units ran out of power, and both Shepard and Turnbow became visible in the chamber.

The Salarian interrogator's eyes widened, but if he hesitated, he processed it at the typically advanced Salarian mental speed and was past it before either human had a chance to react. "I told you," Doctor Johnson whispered. "Didn't I say it, Sofie? Didn't I tell you? They came to get us. They came to rescue us."

Sofie Ivanova didn't react. She just stared blankly, eyes unblinking, only the rise and fall of her chest showing that she was even alive.

"I don't think so, human," the Salarian said.

"You don't think so?" Jane asked. "What exactly do you think is going to stop me from forcing you to? Or from having your guards blow your brains out?"

"Basic deduction," the Salarian said. "Prioritized armed combatants. Controlling two at once. Considerable feat, only possible for the strongest human telepaths. Controlling three extremely unlikely. Furthermore, this chamber under observation. Cameras. Sensors. Would detect weapons fire. You can't afford to set off alarms, or you would have fired already."

Damn it. The annoying thing was, he was right. She was pushing to control two at once, and they couldn't afford to fire their guns. Hell, at some point, the people in the security room would get curious why the interrogator had stopped and was watching the wall just outside of the camera's view.

"What do you suggest?" Jane asked.

"Exchange. You wish return of scientists and not to have your presence exposed until you depart ship. I wish to depart this room alive and with the information I have gathered from these sessions. This exchange seems equitable."

"What's your name, Salarian?" Jane asked.

"My name is Jondum Bau," the Salarian said. "You are Commander Shepard. Are my terms agreeable?"

Sofie Ivanova's eyes suddenly gained focus, and she lunged at Jondum Bau like a viper. He was faster. He pivoted, using her force against her, sending her flying in the same direction she had been moving. She hit the far wall with a cry of pain. "Suspected a trick," Jondum said, "Hypothesis confirmed. The female's mind is more resilient than it appeared." For all that, he didn't take his eyes off of Shepard.

Damn it. This was about to turn into a combat mission. "Tali," Shepard said telepathically, "We're about to kick the hornet's nest. Work fast."

Tali's only response was a string of Quarian curses.

"Human," Jondam said, "Are my terms agreeable?"

In answer, Jane shot him in the chest with her laser rifle. It utterly ignored his kinetic barriers, and at this range it would burn through enough of his armor that his chances of survival were equivalent to a coin toss. The Salarian dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

The moment Jane pulled the trigger, Private Turnbow rushed forward and snapped Doctor Johnson's bonds like they were made of tin foil. Doctor Ivanova was already staggering back to her feet, and she took the time to kick the fallen Salarian in the ribs before she turned to her rescuers, took a breath, and then said, "I think I'm ready to leave if it's all the same to you."

The alarms went off a second later, blaring loudly in the room, and blast doors descended, sealing them in the interrogation room. Jane concentrated, forcing the Asari and Salarian guards to turn their weapons on each other and pull the trigger. Her eyes widened when those weapons fired coherent energy beams which burned through their respective barriers with a few seconds of sustained fire, and ended their lives with a few seconds more.

"That was no laser," Jane muttered. "EDI, did you get that?"

"I did," EDI said over the comm. "I believe it to be an advanced particle beam weapon. It was not known that the Citadel races possessed this technology."

"Damn it. We need a way out. EDI, do you have access to the ship's main computer yet?" The room was far too small to allow for them to make their own exit with Turnbow's blaster launcher, and though they might be able to shoot their way out with his heavy plasma rifle, it would take time.

"I'm almost done, Shepard," Tali said, replying for EDI. "Just a few more seconds…"

"I'm switching to active sensors," Shepard said. Radar and ultrasound added their voices to the infrared, visual, and ultraviolet spectrums, filling in data on Shepard's HUD, showing the faint shapes of soldiers moving in the halls outside the room.

"Shepard," EDI said, "I have positioned the microdrones for maximum disruption. Awaiting your order."

Jane let out a breath. "Do it."

In addition to their recon function, each microdrone was filled with a hundred steel balls and a directional explosive charge. It wasn't as useful for killing the enemy as it would have been in the days before kinetic barriers and hardsuits, but kinetic barriers could be overloaded, hardsuits penetrated, and there was nothing quite like a dozen mini-claymores going off all at once to create havoc in a crowded ship's hallway. It was a very expensive mine, but it worked.

Every single microdrone detonated simultaneously, and the roar of it shook the hallway. Immediately afterwards came the cries of the wounded and the dying, though these were far fewer than Jane had hoped for.

"Tali?" Jane asked, her voice filled with tension.

"Done!" Tali announced.

"I am accessing the ship's systems," EDI said. "Lifting security lockdown. Good luck, Shepard."

Shepard took one of the particle beam rifles and clipped it to her belt even as the door unlocked with a distinct thunk. She and Turnbow exchanged glances once more. "Once more unto the breach," Turnbow said, his voice deep and resonant: the sort of well trained voice that a person usually only saw on a stage. That was Shakespeare, wasn't it? And damn but that man had a lovely voice.

Shepard hit the door release, and the Eclipse mercenaries on the other side opened fire, filling the hallway with a hurricane of hypervelocity shots mixed with particle beam fire. There were seven of them, and Shepard threw a plasma grenade even as Turnbow laid down suppressing fire with his heavy plasma rifle, seemingly heedless of the shots that deflected off his kinetic barriers. A particle beam hit him, and he ducked behind cover at the very instant that his kinetic barriers went down.

The grenade detonated, filling the hallway with a sphere of magnetically contained superheated, ionized gas. A Salarian and an Asari commando were instantly killed. Two other Asari fell back from the heat. Three more kept firing.

It was enough of a reduction in force for Jane to justify ducking her head out once more to make telepathic contact with one of the Asari commandos - one with a particle beam rifle. "_Let me in_," she whispered, her eyes glowing beneath her helmet with purple light.

Lineya. The Asari's name was Lineya, and she was a maiden. She had just signed on with Eclipse. They'd promised her excitement and adventure, and an escape from a humdrum life in a humdrum city on a backwater Asari world. She was quick to laughter, and loved life, and the universe, and she loved her mother, and her Turian father had just died a few years ago, but he had died very proud of her.

Shepard forced her to turn on her fellows, firing an extended blast with her particle beam rifle into the back of the Asari in front of her, and then the next, and the next. Between her and Turnbow, the hallway was soon clear of threats. Then Shepard hit her with a mindfray that temporarily severed her connection with reality. Lineya went instantly catatonic, and dropped to the ground amidst the bodies of those she had killed, and those who had been killed by the microdrones.

A single tear traced its way down the fallen Asari's cheek.

Jane and Turnbow met up with Tali and Sgt. Jones just outside of the crew area. By this point, EDI had gained enough control of the Atesan's systems that she was actively locking security forces behind blast doors to allow for a smoother escape: they encountered no further resistance on their way back to the cargo bay, though several blast doors showed evidence of someone trying to cut through them from the other side.

"Team two," Shepard asked telepathically, "Have you located the MELD shipment?"

"We've got it, Commander," Jacob Taylor replied. "It was in a secure area off the main cargo bay. We had to cut through a high security safe. Nothing too complex."

"Nice work," Shepard replied.

Two minutes later, the Avenger was accelerating away from the Atesan, and just in time: the Atesan flared its plasma torch as it spun around, its weapons and kinetic barriers charging. "We're clear!" Shepard called.

That was when the Normandy opened fire with a full broadside at close range, her plasma and laser weaponry slicing through armor before the kinetic barriers had a chance to come fully online, puncturing into the ship's vulnerable innards and setting off half a dozen decompressions. It fired twice before the Avenger landed safely in the launch bay, the first salvo catching the Atesan amidships, the second blasting into the superstructure around her primary thruster. The Atesan's fusion torch guttered out. Then the Normandy pivoted and accelerated away from the Asari Q-Ship, leaving it to flounder on its approach to the mass relay. The Atesan's return fire came, but uncoordinated, slow, and sloppy; EDI had done a number on their computer systems, and though they scored a few hits here and there, between the Normandy's shields and armor, nothing was inflicted beyond the most superficial damage.

A minute later, the Atesan was out of range. Ten minutes after that, the Normandy vanished into the Relay network.

* * *

The after-mission report was a long one. Although they had not been able to maintain stealth, all mission objectives had been accomplished: the MELD was recovered, the scientists were rescued, and the Atesan's logs were successfully uploaded to the Normandy through the connection Tali had made. So it was that four hours after the fact, even as the Normandy made the last comm-pod retrieval, Jane Shepard found herself in the FTL comm-room, making her full report to Central.

The man on the other end of the transmission was impressive. It was impossible to tell his real age, but he was Chinese, with short, cropped white hair and a smoothly shaven, scarred face. He did not have the bearing of a man to be taken lightly, and he looked hauntingly familiar. As Jane finished her report, Central rubbed at his chin, the gesture of a man long accustomed to a beard. "Interesting," he said. "And was your AI able to discover the source of these mercenaries?"

"Not entirely," Jane replied. "They maintained at least that much operational security. We don't know who hired them, but we know who their Fixer is. And more importantly, where their Fixer is."

Central looked thoughtful. "Yes," he said. "Nassana Dantius."

Shepard nodded. "Illium."

"Very well, Commander," Central said. "While I find the involvement of Jondum Bau to be highly suspicious, unless and until such time you and your ship are required for further UFO interceptions, I hereby authorize you to deal with the situation on Ilium however you see fit."

"Why is Jondum Bau's involvement suspicious?" Shepard asked.

"Because he is on our list of suspected Council Spectres," Central replied. "It is most unfortunate that you did not make absolutely certain that he was dead." His lips thinned. "I believe you are walking into a trap, though whether it is a trap for you or for Ms. Dantius remains to be seen."

Jane raised an eyebrow. "If this is a trap, why walk into it at all?"

"Commander," Central said, sounding aggrieved. "Someone went to considerable trouble to arrange this invitation. To ignore it now would be most impolite. You will spring this trap, and when you do, its jaws will shatter upon your counterstroke. Am I understood?"

Jane nodded, and the sense of familiarity with the man grew. His name was on the tip of her tongue. She could almost... "I get it, Shaojie," she said. "I won't disappoint you."

Central's eyes narrowed, and Jane realized suddenly that she had just called the man by his real name: a real name she had no way to know. There was a terrible moment where she had no idea what he was going to do. Then he just moved on, treating it like it had never happened. "I am aware that you intend to recruit your former lover as you have recruited the Quarian," he said. "I have no objection."

Jane actually looked surprised at that. "Really?" she asked.

"It may surprise you to know that XCOM has but one governing philosophy, Commander, and it has nothing to do with any kind of inherent human superiority: whatever it takes to win. We aren't here to make friends, but if making friends is what it takes to win, then that it what we will do. Vigilo. Confido. Central out." The transmission ended.

When Jane Shepard returned to the bridge, she ordered that a course be set for Illium.

END CHAPTER 04

Codex: The Birth of the Alliance

After the First Contact War and the international conflicts which followed, Earth was in dire straits. With severe environmental damage caused by both the First Contact War and the wars that followed between nations on Earth now armed with advanced laser weaponry and armor and equipment that utterly outclassed anything seen before in human history short of nuclear weapons, the human race faced a very real chance of extinction.

Furthermore, the introduction of widespread nanotechnology derived from but strictly inferior to MELD itself proved to be a major source of conflict, in no small part because of its incidental perfection of contraceptive technology: with both men and women now directly able to control their own fertility, it was no longer possible to have children without intending to have children. And once scientists worked out how to reproduce MELD, even more radical changes would be on their way; Another source of cultural conflict came when it was demonstrated in an experimental setting that with MELD, body modifications of all kinds would be cheap and easy, and just as easily reversed, up to and including complete biological sex changes. But even beyond that, there would be gene-treatments that could give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, treatments which could allow the regrowth of lost limbs, to regenerate damaged nerves, and even a cure for aging.

The Faithful had always dreamed of a day when their god would make the blind to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, and when these things were done before their very eyes by the ingenuity of human science, the reactionary and the regressive called it blasphemy; other religious leaders said that a child could imitate his father without thought of mockery, but because he was his father's son. But many refused to embrace the new technologies, and so were quickly left behind by a rapidly changing world. Many spoke of the coming judgment: The Second Coming, and the end of all things. Some actually sought to bring that end about.

With the Earth becoming more and more a hellhole, its ecology hopelessly ruined, in places still infested with Chryssalids, and generally unable to support the human population and its people waging war and holy war and culture war, up to and including nuclear exchanges between India and Pakistan, Iran and Israel, North Korea and China (the DKP had actually intended to target Japan, but something went wrong with the targeting systems), it became increasingly clear that if humanity was going to have a future, it was going to have to be away from Earth.

So began the single largest, most complicated, and most dangerous period of human migration in the history of the species. There were a thousand potential failure points, a thousand ways the migration could have resulted in simple extinction. Against all odds, the efforts of the XCOM Funding Nations met instead with hardscrabble success after success. What began as one of two scientific Martian colonies jointly run by XCOM and the Council Nations soon became a new frontier for immigration, drawn onwards by the promise of a better life, of a world with the possibility for more than an ugly, early death. With a few tragic exceptions, only those who were unwilling to be a part of the migration were left behind. It only started with Mars; once the process of producing Elerium was discovered and the use of the alien hyperdrive became economical, the diaspora began in earnest; eager to escape the now stifling, poisonous cradle, mankind spread to the stars.

Earth was, for a time, left to the minority who could not accept this new world or who simply would not leave the homeworld behind. But despite their refusal, the benefits of the reverse-engineered alien technologies spilled over even to those who refused to embrace them: they could have anything they wanted, except relevance. Further generations were given the same choice as their parents, and over the course of a hundred and thirty three years, the irrelevant minority dwindled into effective nonexistence: some were unable to overcome the old ethnic hatreds and wiped each other out; some died to the increasingly unfriendly environment; some decided to leave the Earth after all a generation or two down the road; and a very few groups, the Amish among them, simply endured, living as they always had, surviving through cooperation, community, and a sheer, stubborn refusal to give up. Earth has only recently started to be re-settled.

In time, a new, united government was established: An Alliance of the various human systems and interests, its worlds settled by the coalitions and combined governments that survived the aftershock wars: United Canadian and American States, the Euro-Syndicate, the former Arabian Bloc - now the United Islamic Nations - the Egyptian Cartel, Africa Corp, the Brazilian Union, Aztlan, the Indonesian Consortium, Scandinavia, Neo-Japan, Free China, the Australian Union, The Korean Federation, Eurasia, and the Icelandic Union. In honor of the homeworld, it was called the Earth Systems Alliance. And its capital world was Mars.

* * *

Author's note: I have revised the chapter, 'First Shanxi' to better account for the capabilities of the Mass Effect ships. ME ships should have maneuverability and acceleration superior to the Alliance ships (albeit subject to heat and reaction mass limitations that the Alliance ships do not have) on account of the ability to _reduce their mass_.


End file.
